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Microsoft Edge sets Yandex as default search engine in Moldova

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Re: Microsoft Edge sets Yandex as default search engine in Moldova

#51

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

jaynetics wrote: post #40
AdrenalinMd wrote: post #2

Microsoft signed a deal in 2015 to set Yandex as the default search engine in several countries close to Russia. The article mentions "Kazakhstan, Turkey, and Ukraine". The list is not exhaustive, as I know about Moldova and Georgia. https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-partners-russias-ya... The list includes Ukraine! I've tested Edge with Ukraine as a Region on my MacOS, and it no longer appears to set it to Ya…

Thank goodness edge's market share is very low in these countries. About 2% for Moldova [1]. For MSFT, this is a huge embarrassment, reminiscent of Google's infamous "project dragonfly". And they deleted your inquiry on their forums for "violating the community guidelines"! Not exactly PR geniuses, are they? [1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/moldova

Edge is so irrelevant, that you have to wonder why everyone's obsessing with MS's recent moves with it.

It's <5% (and decreasing, still pretty quickly).

Re: Microsoft Edge sets Yandex as default search engine in Moldova

#52

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

AdrenalinMd wrote: post #2

Microsoft signed a deal in 2015 to set Yandex as the default search engine in several countries close to Russia. The article mentions "Kazakhstan, Turkey, and Ukraine". The list is not exhaustive, as I know about Moldova and Georgia. https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-partners-russias-ya... The list includes Ukraine! I've tested Edge with Ukraine as a Region on my MacOS, and it no longer appears to set it to Ya…

And once you go to Yandex search page, it will spam you to death to install Yandex browser, which will automatically install Russian government CA certificates, allowing them to spy on all your web traffic!

Re: Microsoft Edge sets Yandex as default search engine in Moldova

#53

Post by lnsru »

I see often enough cyrillic street names in Google Maps or Street View in Germany using Windows in Germany with regional settings for one of former soviet “republics”. Tried to report it to Google but nobody cares despite russian language and cyrillic writings have nothing in common with my regional settings.

Re: Microsoft Edge sets Yandex as default search engine in Moldova

#54

Post by somethingreen »

perfect_kiss wrote: post #7
mabbo wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incredibly damning of Microsoft if they were making deals after 2014 to help the Russian aggression against Ukraine. That they would still be participating in this deal is even worse.

Ukraine banned yandex in 2017 for mass data harvesting of Ukrainians, probably that's the main reason why gp did not find it in Ukrainian Bing. It's still possible and perfectly legal to access yandex or other data harvesting engines/disinfo websites over VPN or Tor, so the ban main objective is to protect non-tech-savvy users from the interference of hostile foreign criminals.

Not sure why the downvotes, as, yes, Yandex along with several other russian internet service companies is blocked in Ukraine and it is almost certainly why it is not being set as default, because doing so would straight up break search altogether.

Re: Microsoft Edge sets Yandex as default search engine in Moldova

#55

Post by somenameforme »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #42
foverzar wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whataboutism Literally "don't dismiss my non-relevant hypocrisy". Cheap rhetorical tricks aren't really a great look either.

The entirety of the comment is saying: A. It’s ok because war B. Voice of America does it so it’s ok That is, quite plainly, whataboutism. There is no substance in the comment beyond “others do it too so it’s ok for Russians to as well and if you think otherwise, well look at these others” I know it’s hard for you to see whataboutism when your comeback to Yandex being censored was “In any case, the problem is that an…

I read his post as, "Mainstream news outlets within countries tend to be biased towards the interests of that country." I think that's a more good faith interpretation, and leads to a sort of water is wet type observation. That said I do think he more or less self-hijacked his own post by specifically naming Voice of America which is practically begging for your claims.

Re: Microsoft Edge sets Yandex as default search engine in Moldova

#56

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #18
egorfine wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yandex search is vastly censored. See recent leaks for the list of the keywords they replace in search queries.

Sure, but how often do you search for "old fart" and expect to see Putin? OTOH, their image search is way better than google's.

"old fart" has never been associated with Putin, in any language. If, however, you Yandex "bald dwarf" in Russian, you will immediately arrive at the desired result :) if you are outside of Russia. Not sure what happens inside, for some reason my VPN provider doesn't have Russian servers.

Re: Microsoft Edge sets Yandex as default search engine in Moldova

#57

Post by pessimizer »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #51
jaynetics wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank goodness edge's market share is very low in these countries. About 2% for Moldova [1]. For MSFT, this is a huge embarrassment, reminiscent of Google's infamous "project dragonfly". And they deleted your inquiry on their forums for "violating the community guidelines"! Not exactly PR geniuses, are they? [1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/moldova

Edge is so irrelevant, that you have to wonder why everyone's obsessing with MS's recent moves with it. It's <5% (and decreasing, still pretty quickly).

> It's How many tens of millions of irrelevant users does that represent?

Re: Microsoft Edge sets Yandex as default search engine in Moldova

#58

Post by lockhouse »

AdrenalinMd wrote: post #48
jaynetics wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank goodness edge's market share is very low in these countries. About 2% for Moldova [1]. For MSFT, this is a huge embarrassment, reminiscent of Google's infamous "project dragonfly". And they deleted your inquiry on their forums for "violating the community guidelines"! Not exactly PR geniuses, are they? [1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/moldova

I wonder how accurate those numbers are about Edge. As 79.48% of desktop users in Moldova are on Windows 10 and Windows 11. [1] Microsoft Edge is the default web browser on Windows 10, Windows 11. [2] Meaning at a huge amount of population will see Yandex when they search for something at least for the first time. Unless they install another browser immediately or change the default search engine. And yes, I wasn't e…

Defaults don't matter as much as we all pretend they do.

For the decade that Internet Explorer sucked basically all computer users got programmed to treat it like a Chrome/Firefox downloader. Most users don't know that Edge is Microsoft flavored Chrome now, so they continue to use Edge to download other browsers and move on with their lives.

This is an unpopular opinion, but IE4 and especially IE5 were significantly better than what Mozilla/Netscape were putting out at the time. This is what grew their marketshare more than the bundling that everyone focused on. Then Microsoft sat on IE6 for years and let it fall way behind everyone else. IE7 was basically IE6 with tabs. By the time they began investing in their own browser again it was largely too late.

Re: Microsoft Edge sets Yandex as default search engine in Moldova

#59

Post by somenameforme »

kspacewalk2 wrote: post #22
litiholofan wrote: post #3

I use yandex over google/bing. Works well for western censored content - however it does have a clear disinfo bent for english language searches. I still prefer it over google simply because it returns results like google used to in 2010 or so lol. Give it a go, you'll see what I mean.

>Works well for western censored content Not sure if that's what you mean, but Yandex is great for piracy and otherwise illegal content.

Yandex feels like a relatively simple text search with results from a large number of sources, kind of like Google from ~15 years ago. Modern Google instead feels like it gives you what it thinks you "actually" want, with an extreme preference to push you towards a very limited number of heavily weighted sources.

A simple example would be a search for 'russia usa war'. It's the sort of search that's REALLY annoying using something like Google for because, predictably, it gave me nothing but results about Ukraine from large US media outlets. Yandex gave me this [1] pretty informative Wiki entry as the #1 result, and then three pages describing a hypothetical Russia USA war including this [2] interesting looking video (and channel) on YouTube.

Continuing on further down the results you get ever more interesting things like this [3] that suggests Russia was involved in the US Civil War, on the side of the Union! As is always the case for anything, just because it's published - doesn't mean its true. But in this case it does seem to be, which is something I had no clue of even as a history fan! So I just had a TIL in "my" domain, while spending 5 minutes writing this post (and another 30 exploring Russian involvement in the US Civil War). That's why it rocks. Basically it kind of makes the internet feel like the internet again. And that's nice.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_during_the_Russo...

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woD6RYptp58

[3] - https://www.stolenhistory.org/articles/1863-russian-involvem...

Re: Microsoft Edge sets Yandex as default search engine in Moldova

#60

Post by lockhouse »

thiscatis wrote: post #9
litiholofan wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've experienced more divisive content from western media itself than overt anti-west stuff from RT or yandex lmao.

Feel free to move to Russia if you don’t live there already and you’ll no longer have to worry about being exposed to western media!

The parent of your comment brings up a valid point though.

The Western media pushing divisive narratives is a major problem, that is already starting to tear apart the social fabric of Western society. I don't know what the solution is, but it sure isn't "herr durr, move to Russia!"

You understand that a cartel of traditional and social media companies worked with the FBI and intelligence agencies to push a false narrative (the fake Steele dossier, paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign) and to suppress a major story about corruption by a Presidential candidate (Hunter Biden's laptop), both of which are straight up election interference. Even if you're a Democrat or a never-Trumper this should outrage you.

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