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.
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.
To be fair, that is not Google's fault.
It always cracks me up that when you see the DMCA note on the bottom and you click on it, you get to see the hosts anyways:
Why am I not surprised to see Springer as one of the claimants? /rhetorical question
the word 'random' must be doing a lot of work in that sentence given that they are subject to Roskomnadzor's regulations and are thus forced not just arbitrarily but systematically censor content: https://meduza.io/en/feature/2023/02/01/a-window-into-yandex...
(answering to the OP) Yes, there is nothing the Russians can do with my data that my government hasn't done.
>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.
Same, google is either doing this on purpose to then launch the "saving" LLM or they're just forgetting how to do it, google images is unusable and when it is everything is a .webp. And google search is a pay to win, you type "official python documentation" and the whole first page is full of geekforgeeks and other sponsored websited, and don't even get me started on facts/news where it just shamelessly turns into a propaganda machine.
Yandex is at least gives you 5 or 6 good results before it starts showing things in Russian.
I understand anti-government sentiment but whenever I see a statement like this it makes me devalue anything that comes after it. You really think there is nothing a foreign government might do with your personal data that your government hasn't already done? You really feel like there's a similar level of accountability at stake?
As I understand it, the claim is not that the US/UK are as evil as Russia, or even more or less morally equivalent. The claim is that the US/UK hoover up online information just like Russia (maybe even more), and that they are more exposed to what the US/UK governments do than they are to what Russia does.
Without minimizing the misdeeds of Russia, without resorting to (false) moral equivalence, it's still a defensible point. (Mind you, I'm not sure I agree with it. But it's defensible.)
When millions of us give them our data these kinds of attacks become easier and easier.
But the GRU isn't going to come to my door and arrest me because I searched on the wrong thing, even if I use Yandex. So in that sense, I'm insulated from what they know about me.
I am indeed more afraid of what my own country can do with my data than foreign countries, especially Russia.
What's the phrase... letting perfect be the enemy of good? We'll never be perfect. So by that logic we won't ever be able to criticise anyone, even if their record is considerably worse than our own.
> The US collects so much data about everyone, but people seem to find that ok. On the other hand, Russia collecting data is outrageous. This is such a weird thinking tbh.
The US government is accountable to US citizens. There are regular elections where they can vote out a government that acts against their wishes. They have no such power over Russia, an aggressive power currently waging war against a US ally. Equivalence is the weird thinking, IMO.
I don't think this applies. When it comes to privacy of its citizens, there is no 'good' in the anglosphere. In the US we have a constitutional amendment specifically about the government not snooping but it's effectively moot. There is no respect given at all to the privacy of citizens by government.
In any case, I'm not wanting to get political here, which doesn't make sense, but it's pretty new to me that Ukraine, or for that matter, any european eastern country is our "ally" (US/EU/UK) what we merely did the last 20 years is exploiting them to get what we need (e.g. precious metals, oil and stuff), just as we're doing with Africa.
I get your point about critics, but we condemn, accuse and create conflicts around things we do just the same as Russia. All this, is creating a huge mess and threat of very very severe escalation, that will probably impact Humanity in its entirety. So, in some sense, it's scary and outrageous to see that we (stupid) humans cannot get along.
Some recent parts of the government welcome the corruption.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-citizens-and-russian-intel...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/16/us/politics/election-inte...
Brussels, Vienna, and many other European capitals are full of Russian "lobbyists".
No offense but the fact that someone on HN could get to this conclusion is rather shocking to me. Western Europe has plenty of russian corruption and I'm afraid the ongoing war has unearthed only a fraction of it.
Pretty sure plenty of German politicians were similarly cozy with Russia before.
A pretty basic assumption about Google and Facebook is that the US 3 letter agencies use the data in coups. Speaking as an Australian, the next time we have a Whitlam-style dismissal I assume Google will be covertly involved. Yandex not so much. Similar logic would hold in the Americas, Asia, and most of Western Europe. It'd be fascinating to know what role US social media companies were playing in the 2014 Ukraine revolution too as a comparison to somewhere that is very much a place where Russia would want to weaponise Yandexq.
You can be warm in the winter without doing deals with "the devil", and most average Austrian people don't benefit from that corrupt "trade", just a few banks and oil execs and real estate moguls who get to become even richer, unless you're gonna tell that their immense riches will "trickle down" to us plebs, any minute now.
>A pretty basic assumption about Google and Facebook is that the US 3 letter agencies use the data in coups.
Sure they do, which is why maintaining tech supremacy is a national security matter of the US, and an issue Europe doesn't get, that the more you fall behind in mainstream tech products and services, the more you are at the mercy of the US (and China).
The fact that US companies own all the biggest cloud, social media and chat platforms, gives the US incredible leverage, that nobody else has.
They also very lucky that working pipeline is not blown up.
Putin’s inner circle spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, had his daughter Elizaveta as an assistant to the far-right Aymeric Chauprade, a French Member of the European Parliament.[0]
You will see “coincidentally” similar connections across major western powers like the UK, US, Germany, and Italy.
[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/02/25/daughter-putin-s...
Putin likes to make a show of things.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/a-rus...
Russia has an asset in British goverbment, in the hoise of lords!
Have you neber heard of Baron Lebedev, of Hampton in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames and of Siberia in the Russian Federation??
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evgeny_Lebedev
Current Government was taking political dotations from Russian oligarchs, officially, but somehow thos gets postes
A lot of Ukrainians suddenly found themselves on Russian [claimed] soil and under Russian jurisdiction just a few months ago.
There are certain nations before which I'm not going to incriminate myself, out of precaution, Russia and China among them.
If you’re some kind of public enemy of Russia, maybe don’t use Russian services of any variety.
I can tell you more about Holodomor.
Maybe today. Who knows about the future though? :)
Any examples?
was killed almost a century ago..
>Volodymyr Manyak
car accident
>Volodymyr Shukin
murdered, no suspects etc. I understand the suspicion, but this is nothing but suspicion at this point.
https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A8%D0%B8%D1%82%D1%8E%D0%BA...
If I have to share my data with someone, I'd rather it be someone distant, and with limited capability. Sharing my data with Google is effectively the same thing as sharing my data with the FBI. And the FBI can stick guns in my face and lock me in a steel cage for anything they don't like in said data.
While I'm no fan of Putin, his regime can do precisely nothing actionable with my data, so long as I don't set foot in its territory.
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 Russian tech that helps me get my job done then roll back the Google Search codebase 10 years to when it worked as well as Yandex does today. (Only partially joking)