Seems that Kagi buying data from multiple search providers, including Yandex.

Yandex.com is European based. Money doesn't flow back to Russia from Europe for obvious reasons.

They're talking about Kagi using Yandex as one source of results. For some reason they're just completely outraged about indirectly helping an unrelated company in a country that has one war, but directly helping a defense contractor company in a country that has 20 wars is perfectly okay. As far as I can tell, these people are just concern trolling, maybe paid by Google. They come out every single time Kagi is mentioned on HN.

It is a common reflex to assume paid or synthetic/bot actors whenever outrage seems hard to explain. But I think unreasonable purity standards in small tech companies are a recognizable pattern.

Many people have probably given up on making moral demands of big tech, which are mostly futile. It might feel much more gratifying to redirect them at smaller tech brands, especially those with some version of a good-guy brand aspiration.

This works with Kagi, Mullvad, Proton, Signal, Firefox, Fairphone, etc.

The substance behind the outrage might even be factually correct. But the idea that their inability to answer to impossible standards should define their brand is probably just a compensaring effect of the general disenfranchisement many big tech users feel.

it's the usual HN hypocrisy, I can't count how many top multinational american companies have been, directly and indirectly, supporting the IDF in the still ongoing genocide, but do "hackers" give a damn about them? of course not! we just discuss how cool the tech is, after all, we are in "apolitical" social media and what matters is which new LLM is going to rule them all and nothing else matter, well unless it is about Russia/Iran/North Korea etc.

The IDF is defending its country from terrorists, that is not comparable to a genocide.