Being "apolitical" is no excuse for funding a russian company (yandex). If they did not do this I would probably be a paying customer. There is nothing else in this space that has the trust or features that kagi has.
The other point I have heard them say about using yandex is that there isn't another index that they could use that would be as good. This is a sound argument, but I would rather have worse image search than pay (even indirectly) russia. I wish they would "do the hard thing" and make their own (which I am sure is easier said than done).
As somebody who is also not a Kagi customer because of this the statement of Vlad is exactly "throwing his hands up".
Two quotes from his response:
"Any good search engine remains unimpressed by world politics."
"We set out to fix search, not the world."
All the technical explanations between these two quotes could have also been used to justify why they are not contributing to Russias economy.
But he didn't do that. That is a conscious choice while clearly being aware of the issue.
They are contributing to Russia's economy so I'm not sure what you hoped he'd say contrary to that. I don't consider someone buying from US businesses to be any kind of implicit support of my government, while at the same
time choosing to avoid businesses from a country in the manner desired here is taking a pretty strong political stance.
This may also have an engineering explanation - much easier to move fast and break things if your main code base is open source and accessible to LLMs and coworkers.
Thank you so much for your interest! We’ve definitely thought about supporting multiple CI providers, including GitLab, and your feedback helps us prioritize future features. We truly appreciate it and will keep it in mind as we continue to grow. Thanks again for your support!
The other point I have heard them say about using yandex is that there isn't another index that they could use that would be as good. This is a sound argument, but I would rather have worse image search than pay (even indirectly) russia. I wish they would "do the hard thing" and make their own (which I am sure is easier said than done).