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The Yandex leak: How a Russian search giant uses consumer data

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Re: The Yandex leak: How a Russian search giant uses consumer data

#31

Post by kypro »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #13

>Do we want, at a time when Russia is considering the UK as an enemy, to be providing all our personal details to a server in Moscow? Depends how good the search is. Google doesn’t seem to want to provide me proper results anymore, even very basic image search tasks on google now net you only about 20 results all of which are wrong or useless. Yandex image search actually works. If you don’t want me to use the Russia…

I wrote a comment a few years back how I was using Yandex quite a bit at the time because there are things I'm simply unable to find on Google – sites like sci-hub for example.

Today though I find myself using it daily. The results are far from perfect, but I've never suspected them to be randomly hiding or suppressing search results like many of the popular Western alternatives.

I don't use image search much, but yes I completely agree with you there. Google image search is completely unusable to me at this point, so I always default to Bing and Yandex for that (still need to try Brave). And Yandex imo is the only search engine with a functional reverse image search anymore.

Re: The Yandex leak: How a Russian search giant uses consumer data

#33

Post by [deleted] »

pavlov wrote: post #7
gumballindie wrote: post #2

Funny how news loves to refer to russian companies as "giants". Russian oil "giant", search "giant", etc. Just an amusing fact.

They are giants in the local market, one where making it big practically requires support from the highest level of government. So “Russian [x] giant” really means “Putin’s favored [x] company”.

[deleted]

Re: The Yandex leak: How a Russian search giant uses consumer data

#35

Post by secondary_op »

throw-ru-938 wrote: post #17

Context: Yandex is in the news right now because a couple of days ago its cofounder and former CEO Arkady Volozh was caught trying to hide his Russian past [0], and today he finally issued a public statement condemning the war [1], almost 1.5 years after the full-scale invasion began. [0] https://kz.kursiv.media/en/2023-08-07/co-founder-of-yandex-e... [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/ukraine-crisis-yandex-volozh..…

[flagged]

Re: The Yandex leak: How a Russian search giant uses consumer data

#36

Post by Dah00n »

sdfghswe wrote: post #5
veave wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And lobbyists are not lobbyists, they are oligarchs.

> And lobbyists are not lobbyists, they are oligarchs. ??? No, this is nonsense. The normal meaning of the word "lobbyist" is an _employee_ who uses political connections to push corporate interests. The normal meaning of the word "oligarch" is someone with large wealth. These two are not similar at all. So the phrase you're looking for is probably "And billionaires are not billionaires, they're oligarchs".

1. a ruler in an oligarchy.

2. a very rich business leader with a great deal of political influence (particularly with reference to individuals who benefited from the privatization of state-run industries after the collapse of the Soviet Union).

Re: The Yandex leak: How a Russian search giant uses consumer data

#37

Post by dessant »

GaggiX wrote: post #18
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #13

>Do we want, at a time when Russia is considering the UK as an enemy, to be providing all our personal details to a server in Moscow? Depends how good the search is. Google doesn’t seem to want to provide me proper results anymore, even very basic image search tasks on google now net you only about 20 results all of which are wrong or useless. Yandex image search actually works. If you don’t want me to use the Russia…

The thing I found ridiculous about Google today is the image reverse search, unusable, but I have an extension to use the previous one before Google Lens was a thing.

The classic reverse image search results from Google will not be around for much longer, I've been getting reports about my browser extension no longer working with Google Images in some regions.

Yandex Images also possibly going away or becoming heavily censored is also an issue for journalists and researchers, since it is the best performing publicly available reverse image search engine.

Re: The Yandex leak: How a Russian search giant uses consumer data

#38

Post by dotcoma »

DeathArrow wrote: post #34

> Do we want, at a time when Russia is considering the UK as an enemy, to be providing all our personal details to a server in Moscow? I think I am safer with Russian govt having access to my data vs my local govt having access to my data.

They are not worried about what the Russian government can do to you; they are worried about what they can do to them, to your own government.

Re: The Yandex leak: How a Russian search giant uses consumer data

#39

Post by davikr »

boeingUH60 wrote: post #20
tenpies wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also Western billionaire versus Russian oligarch - even if the source of wealth is virtually identical and their political power probably higher in the West.

"Oligarchs" refer to underground Russian businessmen that cheaply bought up state assets after the USSR collapsed and sold it for exceedingly higher sums later. It's a blasphemy to capitalism to conflate those bandits with Western entrepreneurs that founded and built their own companies from scratch, even though they have their own set of issues.

Sounds like capitalism to me.

Re: The Yandex leak: How a Russian search giant uses consumer data

#40

Post by Dah00n »

>what I’ve found is both fascinating and deeply unsettling.

I see nothing unsettling, unless one considers Google, Microsoft, Meta, Apple.... unsettling too (which I do, but then I don't act surprised and unsettled by a non-US company doing what everyone else is doing).

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