Also, people seem to be oblivious to the existence of the neo-cloud: Nebius whose services and servers, a lot of western AI companies use. Nebius was spun out of Yandex 2 years ago to assuage the "supporting Russia" allegations and is still run and managed by an ex-Yandex crew. By that measure, I suppose using a lot of western AI tools is also equivalent to "supporting Russia".

Yandex is especially tightly coupled to the Kremlin from what I've gathered. It seems less like supporting some American indie game development studio and more like supporting Palantir.

Good thing we have Kagi in the middle to firewall it from us, then. It does genuinely return better results for westerners due to not being subject to western censorship. I assume Kagi is smart enough to, say, down-rank or ignore Yandex results when the search is about Ukraine

The criticism is that a share of the money which goes to Kagi goes to Yandex.

I don't see what's wrong with paying Yandex for a good product.

Some people have trouble paying a company that's tightly coupled to the Kremlin

But companies tightly coupled to the White House are fair game? Seems pretty inconsistent.

No, there's a reason there's a pretty large "buy European" movement in Europe right now and why I compared Yandex to the US white-house-adjacent Palantir.

Sigh. This kind of whataboutism derails all discussions online.

First, there is no requirement for "consistency". Every person chooses where to draw their moral line. The world is not black and white, but the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine by Russia, and subsequent (ongoing!) murdering, raping, and bombing of civilians is pretty clearly on one side of the line in my world.

Note that this in itself says nothing about the United States or any other country. You may consider every other country and choose not to support its economy, and this in no way makes the above point weaker.

It is not really inconsistent. Despite all the flaws of the current US government, USA is still a relatively free democracy. Russia is a full-blown fascist dictatorship. Russia is also a much more acute threat to me than Trump's USA, because I am from central European country formerly in Soviet Union's sphere of influence, that would be next on the chopping block if Ukraine falls.

That is incorrect. There's actually very little difference between the two countries. Except that one is next to you, of course.

> There's actually very little difference between Russia and USA.

Ridiculous statement.

Gathered? Where?

Articles like:

* "The Sad Fate of Yandex: From Independent Tech Startup to Kremlin Propaganda Tool", from the Centre for East European and International Studies - https://www.zois-berlin.de/en/publications/zois-spotlight/th...

* "Different platforms, different plots? The Kremlin-controlled search engine Yandex as a resource for Russia’s informational influence in Belarus during the COVID-19 pandemic", from the NIH - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10130930/

* "How the Kremlin Subjugated Yandex", from GWU's Russia Post - https://russiapost.info/articles/yandex_kremlin

There's lots and lots more out there too on the topic, just a Google search away.