Half a year ago I had a slim hope that they want to at least offer some solution to people who care about not supporting invasion, but now every month my hope gets ever smaller..
I really liked their stated mission and product, but since it depends so much on trust, this ethical inconsistency really kills it entirely for me.
I have been active user for over a year prior to initial scandal, but I no longer can trust leaderships judgement, and least I can do is inform people in comments when Kagi inevitably is brought up on HN, that part of their money would go to Yandex.
My country has cut all fuel imports from Russia on May 22, 2022.
And it is weird to compare something you as an individual have very limited control over with directly spending your money with a company. I believe it is important to inform people that part of their spending is going into Russia directly.
Not that i disagree but Russia became very good at selling fuel through middlemen. So you most likely still use Russian fuel. And govs know it but still happily do it because it's cheap fuel. So in my country it seems to mostly be just gov marketing.
We are buying fuel from US, and I am very selective about which gas stations I use for personal fuel ups, to make sure oil source is transparent and not mixed.
Can you share more about employees who support Russian invasion of Ukraine?
The Yandex seems to be using index just like index from other providers? It's not some special relationship, it's just like they pay Microsoft or Google. Both Microsoft and Google are happy military contractors so to me that is as bad as paying russian company.
It's shit but i need search. Seems like there are no "good guy" indexes?
The thing with Yandex is that it's required by Russian law to not include websites which are blocked in Russia (and that's many thousands of websites: https://github.com/zapret-info/z-i). But it's not clear what does it mean for international users - I doubt it outright doesn't include bbc.com or facebook.com for them, but what if it pessimizes those websites somehow? How would anyone detect that?
If the company truly had best search results in mind, they would allow an opt-out for the questionable indexes, instead they doubled down and lost all respect and more importantly trust in my eyes.
