I apologize if this is old news, but I just noticed it. It looks like Kagi has added Fediverse Forums as a default Web search option.
this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2025
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Every single time with red comes up there's always this FUD. You, specifically, don't miss any opportunity to make mention of this. Across Lemmy, which is rather suspicious. Helping the Russian war effort? That's a pretty big leap here.
Why?
Imagine a search engine aggregator aggregating search engine results from multiple sources for aggregation. The more indexes they support the better the results are going to be for everyone, I don't see this as a problem for data aggregation.
Why should data aggregation give any sort of shits about geopolitics?
Regardless, the topic of this post, fediverse search, is part of their own search engine anyways afaik
I have been sick a lot lately, so have had a lot of time on my hands. I don't have a search for Kagi or something. I wanted to use Kagi though, so I was disappointed when I realized that they want to continue this practice.
What are you implying with it being suspicious? In what way?
If Kagi pays a Russian company for a service, that company pays taxes to the Russian government.
Russia spends 32% of its budget on the Russian military. So for every dollar they get in taxes, one third is spent on the Russian military.
With a corporate tax rate of 20% that means 6.4% of Yandex profits go to the military. Since Kagi is mainly a paid service, I don't want my money to go to the Russian military, and I guess a lot of other people don't want this either.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-hikes-national-defence-spending-by-23-2025-2024-09-30/
The Russian people are not to blame, and I am sure a lot of great people work at Yandex and at different companies in Russia. That said, Russia chose to attack a peaceful democratic country, they are currently sanctioned by a lot of western countries in hopes that it will pressure their economy enough to force them to stop the war.
There isn't much we can do to stop the conflict besides hurting them economically and supporting Ukraine. If we continue to use Russian products and services then that does not work. Unfortunately this affects everyone in Russia.
Thank you
I'm grateful someone mentioned it. Paying Yandex is a deal breaker for me. As much as Yandex may want to be independent, they cannot be because of the country they're based in. With the way things are going, the same may be true of Google and Kagi itself somewhere within the next four years.
Kagi defends itself by saying it's "only used 2% of the time" which would make a better argument that turning off the feature to distance themselves from Russia has little impact than a defence for working with them. There's also the "but we've always done it like this" defence and something about "providing the best results" but neither are great arguments.
But yandex is useful for those who search in Russian. The low utilization probably comes from a mostly US/EU customer base, but when it is used, it is useful. I would disagree with disabling it. The best would be letting people decide what back ends to use, but that requires a whole rewrite of the search logic on their side, so it's not happening any time soon...
BTW in EU we still use a lot of gas and oil from Russia, so it's quite difficult to avoid giving them money (especially because we don't know where energy came from for every product we buy).
Doing continuing business with Yandex at all is bad enough for me. I'm having enough trouble cutting off Russia-supporting products and services already, I'm not taking on new ones if I can avoid it.
Kagi is a great concept for a search engine, but looking at the forum posts by their CEO, their priorities clearly won't ever align with mine. I hope they get similar competition as Google crumbles further and further, because their business model is how search engines should be making money.
Fair enough, I am also not attached to kagi, mostly I want companies with good business models to succeed in tech. I want to see ad-revenue based companies (and all the connected industry) to crumble. A man can dream...