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

By "replace" do you maybe mean "alias"?

In any case, the problem is that anything else is also censored. DuckDuckGo stopped indexing RuNet altogether and Google is... Google.

Does the word “alias” somehow make the process kosher?

It is not the gotcha you think it is.

Not sure I understand what you mean, what "process"?. There shouldn't be any "gotchas" unless you are naive about how public service search engines operate.

Your comment tries to dismiss the argument by using softer terms like “alias” (and whataboutism but that’s a whole nother issue).

I am telling you that the word “alias” is not some gotcha that absolves Yandex of their actions like you imply.

You are letting your imagination run a bit too wild (:

Replace, alias or add negative prompts. Multiple ways of converting one prompt to the other.

It's literally rewriting search queries to avoid showing putin in negative context, when people search for "khuilo" or "bunker grandpa", "main thief" etc.

https://twitter.com/romankulish/status/1620227618435125248/p... https://meduza.io/feature/2023/01/30/yandeks-blokiroval-izob...

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.

> for "old fart" and expect to see Putin?

Living in Ukraine, I would love for the world to never see Putin again.

OTOH, I have nothing but tremendous respect for the engineers of the original Yandex. It's hard to overestimate how much they did for the russian-speaking world. I mean, they have basically invented practical stemming for Russian, Ukrainian and other close languages.

> they have basically invented practical stemming for Russian

Living in Ukraine does not make you less factually wrong. They stood on the shoulders of Sergei Starostin and Andrey Zaliznyak. The whole field of Russian Computational Linguistics owes to these two people and their faceless students. Not just Yandex Search.

Thank you, I'm quite familiar with the two.

Yandex search (more specifically: mystem and Yandex.site) was the first practical implementation of their work.

"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.

Yandex sold off the news to VK (ex Mail.Ru) some time ago. Along with Zen blogging platform.

Yandex search operations control was transferred to a new company after the war with the new board headed by Aleksei Kudrin, a longtime confidant of President Vladimir Putin.