"Arkady Yurievich Volozh is a Russian businessperson with business interests in
IT and technology. He is the founder and the CEO of Yandex. Yandex is the
largest Internet company in Russia, operating Russia's most popular search
engine.
Russian State-owned banks such as Sberbank and VTB are shareholders and
investors in Yandex.
In 2019, Yandex agreed to a restructuring that gave a “golden share” to a newly
formed Public Interest Foundation built to “defend the Russian Federation
interests”. Through the Public Interest Foundation, the Government of the
Russian Federation is able to have a veto over a defined list of issues, such as the
sale of material IP and the sale or transfer of Russian users’ personal data to
foreign companies, both of which are deemed to affect Russia’s “national
interest”.
Yandex is also responsible for promoting State media and narratives in
its search results, and deranking and removing content critical of the Kremlin,
such as content related to Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine.
3.6.2022’
Volozh is a leading businessperson involved in economic sectors providing a
substantial source of revenue to the Government of the Russian Federation,
which is responsible for the annexation of Crimea and the destabilisation of
Ukraine. Furthermore, as founder and CEO of Yandex, he is supporting,
materially or financially, the Government of the Russian Federation and is
responsible for supporting actions or policies which undermine or threaten the
territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine."
This is to say nothing of other huge amount of federal funds, or the soft control exerted through politically connected billionaires which is actually one of the preferred mechanisms in both Russia, and the US. Us with our bigtech billionaires, in Russia with their Oligarchs.
On a daily basis, section 230 reminder threats are being used against BigTech to remind them that they still work for the Establishment political parties.
Here is a singular example, of which there are hundreds or more.
It’s not difficult to name shady, unlawful, unjust - you name it - behavior by the US government. It’s not difficult because to find any of it I can simply go to Google and in less than a second I’ll have a list of it all. Try that on Yandex or VKontakte. Good luck.
If you have no evidence or even circumstantial hints your comment is nothing more than a conspiracy theory.
Yandex News service is how a lot of Russians consume news media. It has a systemic history of censorship and propaganda. Also, Yandex search has been known to censor the results as well — always in interests of Russian state.
Once upon a time, in the 00s, Yandex was a great company, with world-class technological community and great ties to Russian mathematical community. (My own high school has a seat in the PIF board alongside Russian universities). Sadly, this reputation is destroyed now.
> Yandex News service is how a lot of Russians consume news media. It has a systemic history of censorship and propaganda. Also, Yandex search has been known to censor the results as well — always in interests of Russian state.
I upvoted you, and though I can't speak or read Russian, I would be surprised if what you were saying wasn't true. However, Google extensively censors and distorts its search results too, while at the same time allowing SEO spam to abound, even when it comes to important areas like health information. If it were one or the other (i.e., great, relevant results with censorship, or mediocre results free from censorship), it wouldn't be so annoying. But the fact that Google actively goes out of its way to censor and manipulate its results, while at the same time allowing the overall quality to deteriorate, is extremely annoying.
> Yandex News service is how a lot of Russians consume news media. It has a systemic history of censorship and propaganda. Also, Yandex search has been known to censor the results as well — always in interests of Russian state.
so same as if you replace Yandex with Google and Russians with Americans
Sure, so if you're in a country that would be hurt by America more than Russia Yandex makes sense. If you're in many western countries then Russia is currently threatening every other weak to nuke you so...
Propaganda is almost unavoidable in modern times but if possible it's better to avoid one that pretty directly goes against your own best interests.
Arkady Volozh is only one of co-founders of Yandex, one who survived.
It is interesting that another co-founder, Ilya Segalovich, was not only
involved in development of Yandex, but was also taking part in public activity,
such as combating electoral fraud, supporting children adoption laws reform,
attending opposition rallies. He passed away in July 2013.
Yandex is a great alternative to Google, btw, provided you're not searching for something the Kremlin has an interest in distorting.
They don't censor results for western sensibilities the way Google does. For example, if I search for a certain wrongthink blog I'm not supposed to be reading, google gives me literally 10 pages of results (I checked, out of curiosity) pertaining to a movie that shares its name--none relevant to the blog. Then when I tack on one additional specifier term (like part of the domain name, or the word "blog"), google magically relents and shows me the relevant results, as if to say, "ok, I'll let you search for that naughty thing, if you're 100% sure that's what you really want." Thanks, Google! By contrast, if you search the blog by name with Yandex (and DDG), it's on the first page.
Also, Yandex never nerfed the facial recognition features of their image search like Google, Bing, and the rest did. (I assume they did this because women complained it made it too easy to find their old nudes.)
Anyway, Yandex is good competition, and while not so much a complete alternative to Google, it's definitely a useful adjunct to it, and it's popular on /g/ for that reason.
>Yandex is a great alternative to Google, btw, provided you're not searching for something the Kremlin has an interest in distorting.
You mean like any topics related to a political election in your country? Russia has a vested interest in helping politicians get elected in other countries that help it's interests over those of others. Given the current internal state of Russia (even pre-invasion) it's unlikely that the interests of Russia even close to align with the interests of the people of those countries. Other nations do the exact same thing but we're talking specifically about Yandex here.
Personally I care more about the large scale political future of my country than I do about whatever random social issue Google is going after that has minimal impact on me.
> For example, if I search for a certain wrongthink blog I'm not supposed to be reading, google gives me literally 10 pages of results (I checked, out of curiosity) pertaining to a movie that shares its name--none relevant to the blog.
What's the blog?
Google is actually generally terrible in cases like this. Any popular pop culture thing will totally drown out anything with the same name, even the original. Try searching for "fallout shelter" - the entire first page is about an old phone game. There are a couple non-game links on page 2, almost all are still about the video game for pages and pages.
> Google is actually generally terrible in cases like this. Any popular pop culture thing will totally drown out anything with the same name, even the original. Try searching for "fallout shelter" - the entire first page is about an old phone game. There are a couple non-game links on page 2, almost all are still about the video game for pages and pages.
No, this is pretty obviously deliberate on their part. When I discovered this a few months back after searching "isteve," and surprised not to find it on the front page, and the results instead being dominated by some 2013 FunnyOrDie parody doc about Steve Jobs, I literally went through page, after page, after page of results, to see how far down it would be, yet none of the pages contained any links to the blog. If it had been on the second or third page, I wouldn't have been so suspicious. Meanwhile, Yandex, DDG, and even (I checked just now) Bing all have results for it on the first page when you search "isteve".
Google's keyword suggestion feature is also telling: google "isteve", then add in a " b" or " u," and you get zero suggestions (presumably because people are searching "isteve blog" or "isteve unz").
> No, this is pretty obviously deliberate on their part.
I'm not so sure about that. Because 1) this phenomenon seems to be present on non-political topics, and 2) other, even more right-wing figures are still easily findable on Google (including links to their own websites). That raises the question, why this guy and not the others? Heck, it not even this guy, just this term, since the blog in question is the fourth result for "steve sailer" and even autocompletes.
I think it's a very reasonable theory that the same phenomenon as I found with "fallout shelter," is at play here but the difference is your "iSteve" blog doesn't have the relative popularity to peek through even a little bit over the pop culture thing (v.s. fallout shelters, which is a topic with a significant popularity, even if it's far less popular than the video game).
> Meanwhile, Yandex, DDG, and even (I checked just now) Bing all have results for it on the first page when you search "isteve".
It's quite plausible the reason for that is because their algorithm is different, and not so biased towards popularity as Google's (perhaps because they don't rely so much on click-stream data to determine what people want to see).
Google search has gotten really terrible in recent years, especially if you're looking for something a little off the beaten path in situations like this, and I think the exact reason is an over-reliance on click-stream/popularity data.
True, it often comes across as if non-Russian speakers are an afterthought to them. I wish they did more to appeal to the 'westerners miffed by western search engine censorship' demo.
It is interesting. Can someone explain why there is no similar sanctions coordinated with US Treasury? I was under the impression they were supposed to move in tandem. Or the understanding exists that Arkady does not have assets in US?
In 2019, Yandex agreed to a restructuring that gave a “golden share” to a newly formed Public Interest Foundation built to “defend the Russian Federation interests”. Through the Public Interest Foundation, the Government of the Russian Federation is able to have a veto over a defined list of issues, such as the sale of material IP and the sale or transfer of Russian users’ personal data to foreign companies, both of which are deemed to affect Russia’s “national interest”.
Yandex is also responsible for promoting State media and narratives in its search results, and deranking and removing content critical of the Kremlin, such as content related to Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine.
3.6.2022’
Volozh is a leading businessperson involved in economic sectors providing a substantial source of revenue to the Government of the Russian Federation, which is responsible for the annexation of Crimea and the destabilisation of Ukraine. Furthermore, as founder and CEO of Yandex, he is supporting, materially or financially, the Government of the Russian Federation and is responsible for supporting actions or policies which undermine or threaten the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine."
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=OJ:L...