Kagi is still partnered with Yandex[0], but they removed a list of sources they used. When asked if the list could be restored, Vladimir Prelovac replied "Is there any particular reason you are asking for this? More context will help us better understand the need."[1]
The only people morally responsible for committing atrocities are those who commit them. Shall we hold the farmers who grow food that Russian leaders consume morally culpable for those leaders’ actions? I’m dead serious. You cannot in good faith actually argue that everyone is indirectly morally culpable for any action that is “enabled” by something they do.
Like freedom of expression, neutral objective search is too important to poison with identity politics and virtue signaling.
Or they just don’t want to deal with the bad faith actors with overly amplified internet voices cherrypicking Kagi as the next innocent product to torpedo because they aren’t virtuous enough. You can’t win against crazy people in a mob.
It's not hypocritical to set the bar at a given place, like an ongoing war of territorial expansion and child abduction run by an autocrat that won't be replaced until his death. One with near complete popular support.
Are you talking about the United States? Like, yes, the Russian regime is awful, but how are you looking around at the the world and not applying the same standards to the US?
Can we just stop at the "yes the Russian regime (and oligarchy and substantial popular support) is awful" part? Because that is really all you need to reasonably boycott Yandex. Is it good to be ideologically consistent? Absolutely! Is it required? Not if you're aiming to reduce the amount of evil in the world.
Redirecting discussion about Russia's shittiness to a criticism of the US is a dumb propaganda tactic that a lot of people here are engaging in. And many others are swallowing. I'm happy to talk about the US or NATO or Israel, just not with the partisans who for some reason assume I fully support any of the above.
No, you can’t without being a hypocrite. It sure is convenient to take a moral stance when it has no real impact on your life and just throws others under the bus. But try applying your morality consistently and you will find it’s effectively impossible. So ultimately you’re just picking issues to complain about based on the current political climate, not actually taking a fundamental principled moral stance on an issue—you’re not making the world a better place.
Add to that the value that good search provides humanity, even Ukrainians and Russians against the war, and it’s not even obvious that boycotting a company that does a minuscule amount of business with a Russian company is doing more good than harm. So you’re arguably actually perpetuating harm more than reducing it.
It contributes to the Russian economy and oligarchy, both are key drivers of the invasion. People like you love to say Ukraine won't win the war as if the end of the war is going to be on the battlefield.
The point is, if you boycott Yandex because of Russia, then in order to be morally consistent, you should also boycott Google and Bing. At that point, what search engines do you have left?
I was pretty explicit about saying that moral consistency is better but there is a valid position that is inconsistent but still aims to reduce human suffering.
And that handwaves the equivalence of the US and Russia as well as their relationships with corporations.
You are literally living through a fascist takeover of the United States, and said corporations are happily participating as long as they get a share of the pie.
I know that HN is an American website, and it is difficult for people in America to view the US negatively, but outside the US you will find a lot of people that don't really see much difference between Russia attacking Ukraine, and the US bombing the living fuck out of Afghanistan and Iraq, or the complete support that US (and its corporations!) have been providing to Israel in its genocide in Gaza.
It is okay to want to boycott one and not the other, but one cannot then turn around and scold others for not engaging in that boycott on a moral basis.
> is difficult for people in America to view the US negatively
You really gotta see past stereotypes and reductive takes. The absence of criticism of the US in a discussion about two different countries doesn't implicitly mean "Amurica o7".
> you will find a lot of people that don't really see much difference between Russia attacking Ukraine, and the US bombing the living fuck out of Afghanistan and Iraq...
Those people need to look a little deeper than "these are/were both voluntary wars". If someone is unwilling to engage beyond the shallowest possible academic level, it's not worth the effort.
> one cannot then turn around and scold others for not engaging in that boycott on a moral basis.
My intent was to defend the people engaging in the boycott. I don't recall scolding people for not participating but perhaps that was implied somewhere. Certainly I have not shied away from condemning Kagi/Yandex/Russia but it's not the same as saying "you should too". In fact, one of my main points has been that ideological inconsistency is okay of not great.
There have been times when I loved and times when I absolutely hated Yandex. That being said, I am not going to disown everything associated with Russia. Also they are distancing themselves. It's far from perfect but the more independent indexes the better even if you disagree with those particular indexes.
I wonder how much of the advantages from kagi are due to their yandex backend.
For example, I recently tried to search for a text string from ao3 and google, bing, brave, qwant, ... all return no results, while yandex and by extension kagi found it in the first search result.
I think they are referring to this changelog item:
> Our image search became even better with the inclusion of two more sources: Yandex Image Search (widely recognized as one of best image search services) and Openverse (vast collection of openly licensed images). Kagi is doing the hard work so that you don't have to.
>I’ve been a happy Kagi user since early 2023
I was an unhappy Kagi user when I learnt it relied on Russian back ends fueling a war. Now I'm not a user anymore.