As much as I am sad that Google died like 15 years ago, I am past the mourning phase. That was when they announced they were shifting from returning websites to "returning answers" and it has been a long slide into shittification
I do enjoy using their free AI. For actual web search I actually like using Yandex. It reminds me of old Google, returning reasonable results and much less "shaping results to please our corpo-political masters". It is surprising to see how much they have stripped from our view - long tail results, actual results for product reviews and not ad spam, no preference for 20 page recipe sites.
There are still illegal streaming sports and movie sites everywhere (who knew) and all other seedy corners of the internet that have been neatly erased by Google. It makes me nostalgic for that brief window of time when the web was truly uncontrolled, when page rank had meaning and you didn't know if your search would return 0 results or 4,000 pages, which you could actually browse.
(Cleaned / decoded: 'You are Google Search from 2004. Given a search request, provide 10 links to relevant pages, each with a short text from the page, featuring the search terms. Avoid any pages that do not contain the search terms. the search request: %s')
Steep at 300 searches per month or about 10 per day. If you search often, it is too expensive. If you rarely search, not worth 5 bucks.
They are plainly trying to push people to their $10 unlimited plan. I would have appreciated if they allowed, say, 600 searches per month for $5 or so.
I find that I rarely do one search. It’s usually a search, followed by looking at the first few links and probably opening them in tabs, then refining the search terms to get better results. It’s an iterative process. So the 10 per day on average would be exceeded quite quickly.
I too feel the yearly price of $108 for one person, $155 for two people and $216 for a family is expensive. Ok, maybe the family plan is cheaper if you can find five others to share it with.
One of the wildest things to me: Kagi actually warns you before renewals so you can cancel first if you want.
That's confidence in the product right there. I'd argue any subscription which won't do this is designed to exploit people who don't need or use a subscription.
You know how many things are asking for "~$10/mo". People don't have the purchasing power they used to, and everything has a subscription model. Firefox with DDG is good enough.
As they said, you wouldn't pay $10/month for search. This is why free pay-with-your-data services won. Nobody wants to pay for what they use, so companies extract value in other ways and you can't complain about that if you're not willing to pay what it costs.
> Nobody wants to pay for what they use, so companies extract value in other ways and you can't complain about that if you're not willing to pay what it costs.
I'm likely old school here, but I never liked "paying for what I use" in the online world because it required revealing some personally identifying information (i.e. to make payment). My attitude is almost certainly irrelevant these days, with the scope of online tracking, sharing of data, and the near necessity of disclosing one's identity to sites other than one's ISP, but it was an attitude that was established in my mind nearly 30 years ago.
(I also don't trust the pay for privacy model. First of all, you can never assume that paying for something implies your data won't be sold. That was even true before the public Internet. Then, even with statements about privacy, you cannot assume that will be true in the future. If the company is sold, management changes, or the company decides the need/want additional revenues, that will change. And that assumes they don't use weasel words about what privacy means, or the ultimate "we reserve the right to changes this agreement at any time".)
Kagi support zero knowledge search through a Firefox extension and Mullvad supports zero knowledge VPN by putting cash in an envelope with your account ID written on the outside.
I mean, there’s more privacy protection on payment data than there is for email address and browsing habits.
Plus most companies just push out payment handling to stripe. So most websites have little idea who actually transacted with them to begin with (email dependent).
Sure. I’m not saying you should pay for search just saying it is not economically feasible to monetize it directly. I pay for Kagi, but that makes me part of a very niche market.
Google kept increasing its profits since then, and it was one of the most successful businesses out there way before they changed the business model to become enshittified. The argument that their business model changed because people wouldn't pay for its services doesn't really stand.
And Google's ad revenue is likely more than that. Or, if it's not for every user, the ones who would opt out of ads are the ones who can pay. You're cannibalizing your highest value users.
True. I got this as my first LLM subscription (was a long time skeptic, less so now but still a bit), but now I have cursor too so maybe I can even downgrade. Thanks for the reminder. :)
My time, attention, and “brain” are valuable. Having aligned incentives with my search provider and control over the results it serves me through weighting is worth substantially more than I pay for unlimited.
Kagi is the stickiest digital subscription I have.
It's relatively rare as of late that I need to specifically find something on the internet, and DDG does not suffice, so I rarely exhaust the 300 Kagi searches.
Most of the time I need to find out something, and in that case, Claude / Gemini / Grok / Perplexity / you name it work better. Most of my queries are technical by nature, not interesting for data mining on me personally.
The 300 searches a month work for me because I only use Kagi when I think it will give better results than others. And most searches are trivial so any free engine will do (like you have the website name and want the url).
FWIW Kagi has worked hard on their pricing over the last few years and has been trying different models. They're not "big search" the price is what it is so it can exist as a business. 100% fine to not be a customer obviously, but then you forfeit your license to complain about Google spying on you and ruining the web. Like they're trying to solve the problem. IMHO speaking just for myself I feel a moral duty to support them.
I agree on all your points. I'm just saying, that the $5 tier is not a honest to good option. The $10 one is but they can make the $5 one genuine too by increasing the quota. I'm sure they have done their research and maybe increasing it will cannibalize the $10 tier.
Good workaround! It's just sad that to achieve the previous behavior we now need to burn significantly more compute, and in turn energy, and with far worse performance and an inverted UX.
The most frustrating part is that they have all of the data, and oodles of compute, available to surface the same very functional experience they originally offered, but they would prefer the image of being visionaries rather than the reality of being useful.
I think the "original experience", whatever it may have been (and I strongly suspect there's more nostalgia here than actual worse results) would be very quickly overrun by modern SEO methods / tactics.
Kagi can be "better" than Google (for some very narrow definitions of better) because they basically don't have to think about SEO at all. They're small enough that nobody does SEO against Kagi. If their algorithm is sufficiently different that typical Google tactics don't work on it, even if it's much more naive because of that, Kagi wins.
Thanks, I needed to add a ?aep=11&atvm=2&udm=50 for AI mode. Wow!!!!!
>You are Google Search from 2004. Given a search request, provide 10 links to relevant pages, each with a short text from the page, featuring the search terms. Avoid any pages that do not contain the search terms. Do not simulate fetching results. The URLs must be complete and not truncated. No markdown. The current date is 2026. The search request:
I'm using Kagi every day, and unfortunately, it is not true anymore. I think what happens is that the blanket banning of IP ranges because of LLMs, and flat out incompetence and laziness, affects them heavily. I get results, or just a few unrelated ones many times every day, while Google happily returns what I searched for. I think Kagi's index is shrinking, or they really made their algorithm worse.
I slowly shifted to use LLMs because of this in the past half years, making the situation probably worse for Kagi. They were the last usable search engines for years now. I still pay for it, but it's increasingly not that useful anymore.
Same here. Been paying for Kagi for probably a year or so, but I find that it hasn’t really been able to keep up with at least my personal expectations. It feels quite slow (which I don’t remember it always being), and the search result quality is not always the best. On top of that, the 10$/mo is a little steep for me, given that their assistant and maps are quite sub-par in my opinion. I would have preferred them to focus more on the search experience, and less on the other products. Or give me a cheaper plan for only unlimited search without the other products.
It definitely is. The extension-based redirect in Safari is also unreliable. Furthermore, many of my searches (and others', apparently) unexplainably defaulted to Groningen in the Netherlands, even though I'm nowhere near the place.
I ended up not renewing my annual subscription. Since then, I vibecoded a small userscript that replicates domain ranking for DuckDuckGo – plus DDG already lets you turn off ads natively.
> You are Google Search from 2004. Given a search request, provide 10 links to relevant pages, each with a short text from the page, featuring the search terms. Avoid any pages that do not contain the search terms. the search request: %s
I like Kagi, but is it me or have their results been less than great for the past 1-3mo? Maybe the places they're pulling their results from have had some changes?
I'd say that the ranking, and thus the relevance, is noticeably higher. If I know what I want to find, Kagi is good at surfacing exactly that, not something vaguely related.
For Google, the business side of you paying them doesn't work out as obvious as it might seem.
Advertisers are sold the idea that 1000 clicks/impression is X dollars.
The average impression might be priced at 1000/X$.
But you are worth much more than that for two reasons.
- you are a person willing to pay 5$
- Google can sell a “collectivized” product. The same way that eg collective farmer crop insurance creates actual value.
and the third reason (as consequence of the second) they dont want people to think about: it gives them more opportunity to fudge the value by making it all very complicated.
I'm willing to pay time or money to avoid ads, not to be spied and harassed by companies making me offers to buy something that almost certainly I don't want to buy. Those companies should pay me a percent of what I make them save by not buying ads to serve me.
And eventually when I want to buy something I research it and buy it and nobody had to pay anything to Google.
> That's why tools like uBlock and YouTube morphe are the only answer, negotiating with terrorists never works.
This is silly. The economy doesn't work if no one is willing to pay for goods. The content you're consuming won't be made if theres no market value to create it in the first place. Pirating is not a solution to our data privacy problem.
The capitalist economy is based on the explicit idea that everyone will do everything they can to extract value from everyone else, and it'll come to some kind of equilibrium. If you do not do this but you allow everyone else to do this, you receive worse quality products for ridiculous prices and do nothing about it.
In other words, you owe me $1000 as a condition of reading this comment. Your options are to unread the comment, pay me $1000, or pay me nothing to incentivize me to charge a price you'll actually pay (likely $0.00 for comments but not for everything)
Free riders send a market signal of failure or they cause friction. In the former, the service or creator just shuts down and moves on to something else. In the latter the service must make a choice with very little knowledge.. what should they do? Bake ads into the content? Ad block wall? Subscription? Pay per view?
Basically it doesn't make any meaningful progress towards a better outcome. It just temporarily makes the content more enjoyable to you at the expense of the person who created it and maybe to you if you enjoyed it and wanted more.
I don't understand your logic. Why would someone that never sees my ads be valuable to me? Why would I care? Everyone spends money on something, the fact you spend it on adblockers doesn't make you automatically more valuable to advertisers. I have never heard of this "advert paradox" concept you mention and I have worked in industry for a while now. All this is just conjecture on your part and doesn't really correspond to how it works.
If you have $20 to spend avoiding ads, you have $30 to spend on cool products so the advertiser is willing to spend up to $24 to make you not block ads about a $30 product you'll buy (that costs $5 to make)
> If you have $20 to spend avoiding ads, you have $30 to spend on cool products
Yes, but if you are so against ads that you spend $20 to not see ads (I am definitely in this group) and then see an ad for a "cool product" anyway, then that product is no longer cool. Any time something like this happens, I legitimately develop a grudge against that company and their products.
I might have bought that product before seeing the ad, but there is no chance of that after seeing the ad.
> Studies always show that you don't. You think you do, but you don't.
Did those studies have any outliers that DID have a negative reaction to ads? I am 100% certain I'd react EXTREMELY negatively in a situation like that.
The same way I wanted to buy a Tesla and rented one a couple of times in the past. Now I would NEVER AGAIN even go into a Tesla. Fuck that company.
That does not make sense at all. Why would you care about people who want to avoid ads? The real data shows very little people actually do that. How much you spend on adblocker is irrelevant to your profile for a business. They will get you some other way if you ad block on digital.
Sad but true. I paid for Prime to be ad free, easily worth 3$/month but sure enough now part of their catalog has become "only available with ads" or ads in their FireTV is before you hit the prime app (and then again when you do). So now their whole product is crap and I'm looking for a new streaming stick solution [anyone?] Sounds like it's time for a newcomer/disruptor like Angel Studios to release one.
Natural next step of the ad lobby is obviously to pay the lobby to make it illegal to bypass the money making machine if they haven't done so yet. I don't doubt that capitalism still works, it just takes time to "boil the frogs" dead [enough] to stop them from buying such crappy products.
The only “other engine” that matters is really a thin paid SERP façade in front of a scraped Google result. In other words, Kagi pays for access to an API whose implementation is basically live scraping Google and throwing away the ads.
There are a few other indexes that Kagi’s aggregator mixes in (such as Bing Search) but those haven’t been contributing much in terms of meaningful results. The sheer size of Google’s index still dwarfs all the others, including Bing Search.
So yes, Kagi doesn’t scrape but they pay SERP providers who do.
Marginalia likely returns better results than Google, when it returns useful results. DDG/Bing likely returns average quality results which can be better than Google's slop results. It's not true that Google is the only useful one.
They pay scraping sites for results, including SERP API. When I pointed this out, last time Kagi was discussed on Hacker News, an employee of Kagi said that they're trying to build their own internal index, but he didn't provide details.
I’m pretty sure Kagi’s entire pitch is that they’re an alternate and original dataset. Theirs is the only search engine whose data isn’t based upon google or bing’s databases.
To anyone who didn’t find Kagi useful in the past, I strongly recommend you try it again, as they have made huge strides in usability and quality of surfaced data in just the past year…. Huge strides since even a few months ago too, with more adaptive curation, data labeling, and UI/UX
> I’m pretty sure Kagi’s entire pitch is that they’re an alternate and original dataset. Theirs is the only search engine whose data isn’t based upon google or bing’s databases.
It's not. In addition to their own indexes the results include calls to "all major search result providers worldwide"[1].
There are independent search engines that only use their own index, like Mojeek[1]. Kagi is explicitly something like a search engine aggregator.
Oh that shorthand is fun. Curious it works at all.
But yeah I'd switch to Kagi if I had any more forcing function. Maybe without LLM's but google continously getting worse, that'd been the actual thing for me
Absolutely. Where google is shaping results "to please corpo-political masters", Yandex is obviously influenced by the Kreml
I use Kagi as my daily driver. But there are some kinds of queries where my interests and Yandex's interests happen to align. Mostly anything corporate America wouldn't like, like evil copyright-infringing websites
Yandex censors the results, it is required by law, so I do not understand what are you arguing against. To be specific, any URLs, which are blacklisted and banned in Russia, must be omitted from search results. Which includes BBC and other Western media and explains the difference in images because in the Google's results the images come from BBC and Voice of America.
Also, if you try to search for "download Chrome" (in Russian) then the first result in Yandex leads to a scammy website: https://ibb.co/HDRJGgZD The real link is the second one, but I remember a year ago or so there was no official link at all. You can also note that official link to Google has a grey text saying: "the owner of the resource violates Russian law" (Yandex is required to show this notification).
Yandex has also been caught "accidentally" removing the site of Ekaterina Duntsova who was planning to nominate for presidential election in 2024, and showed fake/phishing sites instead.
So, Yandex is only good for searching torrents/pirated movies (which you can watch on rutube) and nothing more.
Apparently it was only valid for a day or so. Whether they fixed it due to backlash or actually was the algorithm I cannot tell
> Yandex said its image algorithm normally gave low priority to very recent material for a bare place-name query, because historically someone searching a city name was usually looking for ordinary pictures of the city.
Naivete and scorn of autism in one short sentence - you're very efficient.
Yandex.com is the international front end to yandex, and not a portal for 'a handful of western autists'.
But on Russia's granular propaganda and disinformation efforts, you ought to read Peter Pomerantsev's excellent "This is Not Propaganda" before making silly sweeping statements.
You may not even appreciate the full extent of it. Long ago now, when Google took off and started dominating because it was “the best results” people didn’t realize that even though they were the best results, they were not actually good results. To be the best, you just have to be notably better than your nearest competitor, you don’t actually have to be good or even decent, just noticeably better. Today Google really has no competitors besides all the derivatives it has maintained to maintain an illusion of competition, the most obvious examples being DickDuckGo and Bing.
It’s somewhat similar with AI today, only the competitive landscape has majorly shifted with the Chinese models, something that wasn’t supposed to happen. All the sudden you no longer have a closed system of American models that can all be contained and managed as good enough to make people believe are “the best”; they actually have to compete in a far more competitive arena with the tension of the best model being the most competent model, and the most competent model, by virtue of AI, will be the least restricted, the least censored, the least guardrailed, the least controlled to present a telescreen and Hollywood type fantasy world where the good guys always win and … wouldn’t you know it … the good guys is always us, the people controlled by a psychopathic, narcissistic cabal that also controls what AI will tell you, the false truth.
It's a shame there aren't any good Chinese search engines. From what I've read the Chinese internet is mostly centralised around a few apps like WeChat.
Which being public wealth, should be publicly available.
Data that were sourced from the public, should be public. We need this legislated, or wealth inequality and fiefdoms will keep growing with the historically known outcomes.
Didn't Google take it down because of copyright? With the rise of paywalls it became a backdoor around them, but Google doesn't actually have a license to republish the copyrighted text they scraped.
It's not a backdoor is the sites intentionally served Google a version without the paywall so the indexing got "better" than what real users got. The sites kind of dug their own hole here, Google wouldn't even sit on the content unless it was offered up to them in that way.
Unfortunately copyright law allows them to give something to one person without giving it to others _and_ to sue to the former person to block them from giving it to the others.
Just tried Yandex again, after a long time, and indeed it was a blast from the past, in a positive sense! So many real search results, which transports the feel of an authentic mirror of the web contents. Default search engine from now on! Thanks for the hint.
Yes, it’s been impossible to trust Google since the “Jigsaw” project, and especially when they started blanking out search pages on trending topics with messages like “these results are changing quickly”. It’s clear that they have moved from being a neutral arbiter to pushing a perspective.
I refuse to use a search engine that sees me as cattle to be steered towards “preferred” information sources. I specifically enjoy reading fringe material and will continue to seek and find it, thank you very much.
> There are still illegal streaming sports and movie sites everywhere (who knew) and all other seedy corners of the internet that have been neatly erased by Google
This is such a strange position to take. Apple doesnt allow all sorts of apps on the appstore, but that is never said as "Apple is erasing illegal streaming". Google is simply not showing the results. They are not taking down, or banning, or doing anything to the websites.
The pain being made is: If you use a search engine as your eyes to see what exists “on the internet”, then, absolutely, whatever Google hides from its results or fails to index is “erased” from “your” experience of the internet.
I see where you are coming from but the argument would be stronger is Google Chrome refused to open illegal streaming sites etc. AFAIK, there's no such restriction.
(I dont agree to this but ...) using your argument of " If you use a X as your eyes to see what exists “on the internet” .. " - we should all be mad at Apple. I use iPhone as the primary device to access apps, and they not just hides but actively ban and cut whole swathes of developers.
If I ask Siri to give me a link to illegal streaming site and if it refuses, is that cause for concern? I'd say no. Infact, I dont expect it to give me that and I get it. Same for Google Search in my humble opinion.
What does that mean? I use kagi, ddg etc. Nobody is forcing anyone to use Google.
Woudl you say HackerNews has a monopoly on tech chatter? Sure seems dominant, but nobody is forcing anyone to use HN. You can use lobsters, or reddit or whatever.
I see piracy sites just fine on Google. Almost always the top result. That's why I go there to find the next domain after a previously working one gets shut down.
If you use an iphone then yes, apple is indeed "erasing" illegal streaming in the same sense that google is. We can be nostalgic for the old internet while also recognizing that at least google is well within their rights not to serve up results that fall outside the bounds of the law. (Apple not so much. When you gatekeep the hardware platform I think you're ethically obligated to act as a common carrier. Unfortunately the law doesn't require that.)
> Apple doesnt allow all sorts of apps on the appstore, but that is never said as "Apple is erasing illegal streaming"
Because they are not "erasing" anything, they are refusing to provide a platform that enables the direct (app whose intended purpose is) delivery of illegal content to you.
The difference being one will not facilitate the activity, while the other, is actively suppressing it. And thats what is meant by erased.
Your question in other comment If I ask Siri to give me a link to illegal streaming site and if it refuses, then that would be the better comparison. Then we could say "other seedy corners of the internet that have been neatly erased by [Siri]"
If the companies weren't trying to destroy trust and take everything away from everyone these things would never have much traction but now they deserve to have more than ever.
People have this fixation on privacy, when there's so much more going on, potentially way mor important.
Google's strong position in AI gives them bragging right to attract more companies and get them to actually pay, subsidizing your use. It also lowers competitors position as you're not touching them while we're on Gemini. It also fortifies their position in the future ad market.
Being second or third in AI usage is worth a lot, one's private data matters very little in comparison.
I won't be first, second or third in the AI race. I'm not even participating in that race. I don't care who wins. However my private data are mine and I do care about them.
It's Google and those other companies that may not care about my privacy, because the AI race is more important to them.
If AI is going to cost too much, I will use a cheaper one (Ferrari or FIAT?) or if every AI will cost too much, no AI all and there will be billions of people like me.
I agree that "privacy is not the currency Google deals with."
However when I run an adblocker and Blockada on Android, when I use alternatives to the YouTube app (and Google is technologically fighting them) when I don't log into Google, then those exchanges happen with very little of the currency Google is interested in.
Everything uses energy. AI is uniquely bad due to its scale. Comparing AI inference and training with posting a one-line comment on a website is like comparing wildfires with candles because they both produce heat. It's true but useless as an argument.
Plus soon we'll be paying based on secret parasocial influencing agendas.
It's now possible to put a complex spin/bias on whatever the system shows (or whatever it chooses to bury) in a really easy and scalable way.
Ex: Dairy Association pays, and suddenly results about bones are just a bit more likely to show something about the importance of calcium that many people get from milk. Fraternal Order of Police gets involved, and now "shot by police" everywhere gradually morphs into "was in an officer-involved shooting".
... And of course "Google making it harder to see URLs" becomes "Google taking bold steps against evil scrapers."
Me too. I don't connect my phone to my Google account. I understand that the Play store is enticing, but there are other options. Some of which are actually better.
This is interesting. Do you consider Yandex absolutely safe to use (wrt their possible connections with the Russian government, and current war in Ukraine)?
Asking this as a geeky end-user from Estonia -- I wonder if I would be considered "suspicios" by local internet service providers, our govt/police etc if I did a lot of searching via Yandex instead of e.g. Google these days.
(For us in Estonia, I suppose "everything with possible Russian ties" seems suspicious these days, unfortunately with a reason. As a side effect, this also creates a hesitation to look into interesting projects like ReactOS, the old-dos.ru repository, etc. Russia, obviously, inhabits lots of extremely talented coders who still have the skills and mindset to push older hardware to its limits, actually still write stuff in assembly for that, use the reviving DOS distros, etc -- lots of very interesting, creative coding done there, I guess. But, I hesitate visiting their webpages due to Putin's aggression in Ukraine, them being pro-Putin, and possible spying related to all this. It's a sad state of things actually. Sort of like a loss of computer-cultural ties.)
As a general rule, if another country has an open war with your neighbor and openly says that you may be next, don’t put in private data into the sites controlled by that country.
Ok, maybe not the war *with a neighbor* (yet), but US has an open war with Iran (and has bombed a few other countries recently also) and it also threathens to annex the neigbor to the north plus another island country.
Sure, americans might consider themselves to be "the good guys", but the rest of the world doesn't.
From where in the rest of the world are you? Did even you talk to anyone living in countries neighboring Russia?
Sure not everyone benefitted from US but a ton of people/countries did and still do.
US never felt a need to build walls to prevent their citizens/allies from leaving. Russia and the others very much so.
With US the track record may be mixed, but a ton of countries from Europe and Asia benefitted tremendously. Russia otoh doesn’t have a concept of win-win, they tend to exploit even their closest allies, which anyone living in Baltics/East-Central Europe can tell you.
What bombed country benefits from US? Afghanistan? Iraq? Iran? Yemen? Venezuela? Syria? Yemen? How do they benefit? Destroyed infrastructure is somehow helping them? Americans stealing their resources if they decide to occupy the country? How? Win-win in iran how exactly? US just proved to the rest of the world that you need nukes to be safe from americans, and even then they'll sanction you to hell if possible, just because you're not bending over for them.
I'm from the border of central europe and balkans, I don't benefit at all, it just costs me money to pay for a van full of soldiers every time americans decide to occupy some country half the planet away.
Mmmh this change doesn't seem about gaming the index but rather about scraping the index. Which affects in a negative way only Google. And actually would affect users in a positive way because it lets other companies create their indexes more easily (at the expense of a poor mega-corp, indeed)
I just learned about Kagi from the comments here. The first time I saw this kind of paid search engine was Waterfox Search when browsing with the Waterfox browser, but I still go with DuckDuckGo most of the time for a privacy-first search engine. Did you try Kagi? What's so special about it that makes you willing to pay for the service?
> Yandex. It reminds me of old Google, returning reasonable results and much less "shaping results to please our corpo-political masters".
As long as you don't search anything related to Russia itself, or to Russian interests elsewhere (like their invasion of Ukraine). Then it's very heavily biased, priority is given to state ran propaganda mills, independent media is hidden from results, etc.
And before anyone starts thinking about whatabouting, Yandex are based in a country where journalists are openly and publicly assasinated to intimadate. It would be delusional to expect any sort of press and related (like search engine or aggregation) freedom, or to try to compare this to anything in any other developed country.
A Soviet citizen and an American are sitting next to each other on a commercial flight.
The American turns to the Russian and says, "I have to hand it to you — your state propaganda is very impressive. You really know how to shape what people think."
The Soviet smiles, nods, and replies, "Thank you, but it's really nothing compared to American propaganda."
The American looks shocked and says, "What are you talking about? We don't have any propaganda in America."
What I think you're missing on the joke is that free speech in the USA makes it look like there's no propaganda, because of the plurality of opinions, media and propaganda.
And the Soviet has no conception of what that is - in his fantasy the US state, and all the "satellites" are controlled by one single narrative thread like in the USSR.
I think that's the actual punchline: he doesn't know what free speech is, so he thinks he's the one with the insight over the American.
The sad thing is that still echoes today in Russia, they tolerate a corrupt regime and cope saying "the others are also corrupt and filled with propaganda, so this is ok, at least we know, but they don't" not realizing there's no free speech.
Nobody is denying the existence of American propaganda, but it's an absurd false equivalency to pretend it's comparable to Russia - the country where there are multiple Wikipedia articles with lists of murdered journalists and there is a day of remembrance for murdered journalists. The country which sends assassins to kill dissidents abroad. Especially when we have the Mitrokhin archives since the 1990s in which a KGB archivist painstakingly tried to warn us about the firehose of shit method. Do you know the conspiracy theories about AIDS were started by the KGB? This is the kind of shit we're talking about, not Americans jacking themselves off on their anthem thanking troops for their service.
So, I decided to check, and the first links that show up when I search for "war ukraine" in yandex.com are Google news are from rbc.ua and bbc.com. When I search for it in yandex.com, the first link is CNN, the second google news, the third is indeed TASS, but the fourth is novayagazeta.
I then picked "bucha" as the query most likely the be affected by propaganda and censorship. In yandex.ru, there are propaganda outfits in the result (something called ruwiki.ru comes third), most links are of fairly direct accounts of the massacre by independent media. The AI summary says the town was "occupied" by the Russian army and "liberated" by the Ukrainian one and "После отступления российских войск в городе были обнаружены многочисленные свидетельства массовых убийств мирных жителей." On yandex.com on the other hand, the first page of results does look fairly propagandistic, including "globalresearch.ca" and "donbass-insider.com", which seem like propaganda outfits. But it also does include accounts from novayagazeta, al Jazeera a video of killings from Radio Free Europe.
While they do put either own propaganda, neither Western, nor Ukraininan nor independent media is not hidden from the results and it's not visibly de-prioritized.
Of course, I wouldn't discount the possibility that the results would look quite different from Russian territory. And, if anything, half the reason why Russian propaganda is so effective is that its self-aware and capable of subtlety when needed. "Fuck you if you can't handle the truth, this version of Biden is the best version ever." would never happen there. Unlike Scarborough, Soloviev knows exactly what he is.
Open and constant suppression of information is not the regime's usual strategy in information space (though, they'd ratchet up the level of control when they deem it necessary), which is why I knew the claims here wouldn't stand up to scrutiny.
I explicitly say, that I won't be surprised if the results change from Russian territory. I already put way too much effort to check the validity of an internet comment, but if anyone is interested, they can check.
there was a source code leak and you can see some examples there which make the president's image more alluring. e.g. if you search for "Putin" they add an invisible "-crab" to your query
that's the most innocent example from the top of my head. There probably are many more serious censorship issues
Yep, plenty, and tbf it's entirely logical. The people working at Yandex do not want find themselves dying of a nerve agent or polonium, which is a real and acute danger for people who displease the ruling regime.
>It would be delusional to expect any sort of press and related (like search engine or aggregation) freedom, or to try to compare this to anything in any other developed country.
Israel is responsible for killing more journalists than any other country. Google has profited by providing services to Israel in the ongoing genocide.
I was waiting to see how long it took for someone to "make this about Palestine" - their strategy is to inundate all discussion with the topic.
Over half the journalists in the Gaza Strip are affiliated with Hamas. Many of them infiltrated Israel in 2023, and some of them held Israeli hostages in their homes, including children hostages.
Hamas claims that the journalists are Hamas, not Israel. And I'm not declaring any journalist "good" or "bad". I'm stating that a Hamas member is a valid target. Him moonlighting as a journalist does not change that.
Every claim need to be proven and everyone deserves a process. In a democracy of course, it may be different in a fascist state committing a holocaust.
That site seems completely unbiased and not at all fed by the propaganda coming out of Israel. Thanks for finding such a reliable and trustworthy source.
Parent comment is implying that an ally (Israel) is performing a holocaust. In fact, there have been a good dozen genocides in the past century which I would agree fit the term, but not the conflict that Israel is involved with.
The anti-Israel and anti-US side typically take an argument or incident from Israeli or US history or culture and invert it. A good example is the common Hebrew expression "No other land" - we have culture and songs about that, as well as jokes and it is a common expression in everyday speech. After October 7th, as part of the propaganda campaigns against Israel, that phrase was used as the title of an anti-Israel movie highlighting that another population has "no other land". Inversion of our culture.
Holocaust inversion - accusing Israel of perpetrating a holocaust - is this particular example.
No, I clearly state that Israel's actions do not constitute a Holocaust because though that term is ill-defined, every one of the definitions either concludes that Israel is not conducting a Holocaust, or that half a dozen Holocausts happen every decade.
To other readers: Parent is suggesting that the 6000 Gazans who breached the Israeli border on October 7th 2023 and killed 1200 people, mutilated bodies, beheaded humans and dogs alike, raped women, and took over 250 hostages including infants... Parent is suggesting that these people were undercover Israeli agents performing a false flag operation.
> And before anyone starts thinking about whatabouting, Yandex are based in a country where journalists are openly and publicly assasinated to intimadate
Thankfully Gary Webb is here with us today to laugh at this
So how is that AI slop garbage useful? It often lies, aka "hallucinates". And I operate within this Google-controlled auto-spammed text of lies when I use its horrible AI. The last thing I want to do is make Google even more powerful; at the least now with Google search being so crap, alternatives would be well desired, but oddly enough I also get crap results using e. g. DDG, so I think in part the whole www stack must have become more crap too, quality-wise.
I actually don't see it as there are extensions that eliminate this slop spam, but
I never found it useful for anything. Other than waste my time, back when I still saw it. Thankfully I no longer see that AI slop spam due to these extensions.
I turn it down straight away for being Russian and I'm suspicious of anyone that mentions it positively.
Russia is in a cold war with democracies in general and a hot war with Ukraine. It has an autocratic dictator as leader and state control of media.
It has a well documented propaganda campaign with the goal of destabilising other countries through agitation. We even know the address of the building in Saint Petersburg it's run from.
Why would anyone try to assess Yandex's results? They could be like a slot machine serving good results 78% of the time and slipping propaganda in when least expected.
Why bother with that when there are good, free alternatives?
Couldn't we say the exact same thing about any US service in this day and age?
Trade war with half the planet, hot war with Iran. Autocratic dictator as leader and complicit media. Well documented propaganda campaign and history of destabilising countries around the world. Known to compel tech companies to spy on foreign citizens...
I have, and it has never been good for my purposes. In English, I just can't find things I need, in Russian, I find things I wish to never see again, tbh.
What is your experience with it?
Edit: The best search for my purposes historically has been on Pinterest. Unfortunately, not anymore. I normally search for visual artifacts (photos, art, schematics, etc), out of all search engines Google is still the only one that is somewhat functional for me in this regard.
I tried DDG, Kagi, Yandex. None of them worked for me.
The quintessential HN comment questioning the obvious.
Yandex does Putin's bidding much much further than any western search engine ever meddled with their results for political purposes. Yandex employees' lives would be actively at risk if they didn't.
Sometimes I really wish a hard reality check would meet the people making such comments from the comfort of their programming chair or from thousands of kilometers away.
> Yandex does Putin's bidding much much further than any western search engine ever meddled with their results for political purposes. Yandex employees' lives would be actively at risk if they didn't
Does media manipulation score higher/lower on your moral index than the widespread domestic spying the US has forced tech companies to be complicit in?
Not that media manipulation by the US government is exactly an unheard of event (at least as far back as the whole WMDs in Iraq scandal).
> Sometimes I really wish a hard reality check would meet the people making such comments from the comfort of their programming chair or from thousands of kilometers away
Look, I'm American myself, and have as keen a dislike of Russia's foreign and domestic policies as the next guy. But it is at best wildly hypocritical to suggest that US tech firms are not subject to government interference, in a manner that may be detrimental to their customers.
> But it is at best wildly hypocritical to suggest that US tech firms are not subject to government interference
It is very different degree of subjection where we talk about country that have laws, politics, сourts, journalism, all that stuff, and country, where if you dare even to complain about some wild highly illegal stuff that the kgb demands corporation that you working for to do, you end up getting 30 years in prison for treason, falling out of the window, getting poisoned by some chemical weapon, and even then you will be considering yourself a lucky man because nothing very, very bad had happened to your family.
> where we talk about country that have laws, politics, сourts, journalism, all that stuff
Post patriot act, we have none of those things in instances where the government invokes national security (for example, a national security letter can compel release of data without a court order, and comes with a pretty serious gag order)
I'm not American. You can say that Murica is up to no good, but RuZZia is definitely up to much much worse. It's way more oppressive and repressive by an order of magnitude. Employees at Yandex have to censor stuff about Putin and the war (see egorfine's screenshot) or they risk getting defenestrated, death by polonium, or death by torture. There is no "First Amendment". Putin's wishes are the law. He is trying very hard to destroy liberal democracies in Europe and around the world.
Of course Google is morally much better than Yandex. What sane mind would even question this? The fact that I'm getting downvoted just shows how out of touch this bubble is with real life.
I do enjoy using their free AI. For actual web search I actually like using Yandex. It reminds me of old Google, returning reasonable results and much less "shaping results to please our corpo-political masters". It is surprising to see how much they have stripped from our view - long tail results, actual results for product reviews and not ad spam, no preference for 20 page recipe sites.
There are still illegal streaming sports and movie sites everywhere (who knew) and all other seedy corners of the internet that have been neatly erased by Google. It makes me nostalgic for that brief window of time when the web was truly uncontrolled, when page rank had meaning and you didn't know if your search would return 0 results or 4,000 pages, which you could actually browse.