And they have really good products - the Navigator is great, and Yandex Music was better than Spotify (until the war started and a lot of labels/artists disappeared).
I’m not using their products now as I don’t want to feed the government, but they do(did?) some great stuff.
Comment on Google’s dominance on search is declining – for the first time ever!
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 13 hours agoRussian Yandex
Exceptionally good at finding torrent sites and other piracy outlets, because they aren’t working hand-in-glove with American broadcasters to censor and shadowban these links. Google, Bing, DDG, and the other American mainline search sites all focus on feeding end-users into a discrete set of Web2 mega-site sponsors. Yandex uses the older web crawlers and indexing tools, so it gives more honest (abet fuzzier and less reliable) results. And since nobody really gives a shit about Yandex, the efforts to game its algorithm have been comparatively minimal.
Yandex also has the benefit of being relatively English-friendly, while other popular non-English search sites like Baidu, Qwant, and Naver don’t cater too quite so freely.
toofpic@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Pirata@lemm.ee 12 hours ago
Who still uses search engines to find torrent, though?
dan@upvote.au 10 hours ago
It’s been common ever since magnet links were created, since you can post a magnet link anywhere (even in a plain text file) rather than having to upload a .torrent file somewhere like in the old days.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Sites periodically get taken down or rendered less than useful. Especially for live streaming.
Yandex was invaluable when I was looking for Olympics streams, for instance.