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Feels weird to say but I have found using Yandex of all places an excellent search engine for content that get taken down by DMCA requests. Eg if you want to w

Feels weird to say but I have found using Yandex of all places an excellent search engine for content that get taken down by DMCA requests. Eg if you want to watch a movie that's not on Netflix using a web stream the search results are far better. Feels like Google circa 2005.

negativelambda 11mo ago
I just tested, indeed very good results!
chneu 11mo ago
I've been playing around with a variety of search engines such as Kagi, Startpage, Ecosia, DDG. All of them are better than google in finding relevant results. Lol Google is way too "personalized".
- qiqitori 11mo ago
  You can turn off personalization. (Operating under the assumption that most people search for facts, I personally don't see why one would ever want personalized results.)
  - skulk 11mo ago
    > I personally don't see why one would ever want personalized results. The same short combination of words can mean very different things to different people. My favorite example of this is "C string" because when I was a kid learning C I was introduced to a whole new class of lingerie because Google didn't really personalize results back then. Now when I search "C string" Google knows exactly what I mean.
  - Ariarule 11mo ago
    I won't bother defending Google-style personalization as it exists for their search results, but since collisions in terminology across fields are common, it's not that hard to see how actual, thoughtful personalization could be useful. Someone searching for "Kafka" is going to want very different results based on whether they're thinking of software or literature. Opinions may also differ over the usefulness of sources, even for people ultimately interested primarily in facts; I find Kagi-style personalization (make your own domain list) very useful, but across Kagi's userbase Reddit is simultaneously one of the most lowered, most raised, and most pinned domains: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard
    - dboreham 11mo ago
      > Kafka" is going to want very different results based on whether they're thinking of software or literature. Speak for yourself. I've worked in several "Kafka-esque" software organizations.
      - dotancohen 11mo ago
        Arguably Google SERPs are getting closer to The Trial.
    - p1necone 11mo ago
      Anecdotally I find myself appending 'reddit' to search terms very frequently. It's effectively shorthand for "I want to read about peoples direct experience with this thing", and reddit is huge and well crawled by search engines. It's astroturfed to hell especially around political topics, but I feel like it's easy to tell when discussions about random products are authentic.
  - p1necone 11mo ago
    Location based personalization is pretty useful - if I search for 'Bob's Discount Linguine' I want the one in my neighborhood. Lots of niche things (like programming) also reuse common english words to mean specific things - if I search e.g. 'locking' it's nice to get results related to asynchronous programming instead of locksmiths because google knows I regularly search for programming related terminology. Of course it's questionable whether google does a good job at any of this, but I absolutely see the value.
    - skydhash 11mo ago
      I just add another keyword to narrow the search result. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted results based on anything other than the query.
    - throwaway-0001 11mo ago
      Can you show me what results you see for “locking”? I see dancing move in all profiles I have.
      - smcin 11mo ago
        Wow you're right. Locking dance moves and videos. Weere you expecting to see padlocks or doorlocks or what?
        throwaway-0001 11mo ago
        I expected to be “personalized”. I’m definitely more into programming than dancing. I see 0 personalization tbh. And I tried a few different peoples phones.
        smcin 11mo ago
        Oh I see, locking in the programming sense, yes. Either not every search term is personalized for your context, or else this particular search is being applied to some other demographic. But that's weird because "locking" doesn't also show door, windows, filing cabinets. Anyway if you search for "programming locking" you get relevant results. Google didn't used to do this. Anyone got a rough idea when this started?
  - smcin 11mo ago
    Some people search for shopping, or business details, in which case personalization can improve (or disimprove) result relevance based on knowing where you currently are, what day and time it is, what you tend to order etc. etc. And some people search for songs/images/videos/books/articles.
- mtillman 11mo ago
  Google hides the most relevant results on the 3rd page. It was confirmed in trial disclosures a few months ago. Their concern isn’t public search.
  - nine_k 11mo ago
    Seems to not be empirically true.
  - superkuh 11mo ago
    Google only ever returns a maximum of <400 results. If you actually click through at 100/page, you'll only get 3.something pages of results. Despite what is says at the top re: results. Those results are not accessible. Bing only returns 900. Kagi only 200. Deep search and surfing is pretty much gone on all major search "engines".
    - locknitpicker 11mo ago
      > Google only ever returns a maximum of <400 results. That's perfectly fine. If I'm going to use a search engine, I'm not willing to sift through hundreds of potentially relevant results. I hope I find what I'm searching for in the first page, or at best in the first 3 pages or so. What's not cool about Google is that now it hits you with AI slop with dubious quality right at the top, followed by a page of sponsored results, followed by some potentially useful results, followed by an entire ocean of spam traps and clone sites and really shady results with exotic never-seen-before TLDs that leaves you wondering whether clicking on a link will get in a hostile database. That's what's not cool about Google: is that you can't use it to search the web anymore.
      - mschuster91 11mo ago
        It's not Google's fault alone. SEO manipulation for example, that could be tackled by our legal system similar to existing slander, unfair competition and advertising regulations. But unfortunately, most representatives are not digital natives but old digital buffoons, and the post-2000/Gen Z kids never gained an understanding of what actually makes the web tick. As for the TLD explosion, we definitely need a completely new setup for ICANN. The trouble all of that has caused, just for a measly 250k in fees for each new gTLD, is insane.
- TranquilMarmot 11mo ago
  I switched to Kagi a while back and ended up buying their annual subscription for unlimited searches. It's such a breath of fresh air, like a search engine from an alternate universe where Google just focused on search instead of adtech.
- mrweasel 11mo ago
  The fact that Google seemingly returns results worse than Kagi, Startpage and Ecosia is just strange, given that Google provides search results for all three of them. Both Kagi and Ecosia uses other sources as well, I don't know about Startpage, so that's certainly part of it, but it still feels a little strange. From using Ecosia, DuckDuckGo and Bing, I'd also argue that Bing is simply a better search engine at this point.
  - TurboSkyline 11mo ago
    Don’t Ecosia/Qwant have their own index now? Do you find Bing better through Bing proper, or just as good through DDG (which uses the Bing index)?
    - mrweasel 11mo ago
      Last I read the Ecosia/Qwant index is only used in German and French, so I think Ecosia is still running their weird Bing/Google/Other mix. Bing felt about as good as Ecosia, until Ecosia started to mix in the Google results. At that point Ecosia became they better search engine. Bing vs. DDG, I'd say about the same. I stopped trying to use Bing once they rolled out all the Copilot nonsense. Now the UI is unusable and cluttered.
- spragl 11mo ago
  DDG is okay. Startpage is quite good. I make a virtue of regularly shifting between search engines (not Google). Sometimes they are not so good, some times very good. On average Im sure my search experience is better than using Google.
- somenameforme 11mo ago
  Brave search is also quite nice: https://search.brave.com/ https://search.brave.com/ I find Google to generally have some of the worst search results of modern engines with one exception - Google tends to be good at digging up results from things like forums/message boards that don't end up getting listed on other search engines. I don't entirely understand why this is because other engines also have them indexed and work fine with something like: 'site:news.ycombinator.com anna's archive' [1][2] but yet those posts will basically never show up on the main results, regardless of how far down them you go. [1] - https://search.brave.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+anna%27s+archive https://search.brave.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.co... [2] - https://yandex.com/search/?text=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+anna%27s+archive https://yandex.com/search/?text=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+...
- admaiora 11mo ago
  I believe Kagi uses the Yandex index as their base as well.
  - DanOpcode 11mo ago
    Based on what? Have you read that somewhere?
    - quinncom 11mo ago
      Yandex is one of Kagi's index sources. They used to publish a list of their sources but have changed it to a generic "we use multiple sources" because they got so much shit for using Brave (because of its founder’s bigotry) and Yandex (because of the ethical dilemma of paying a company headquartered in Russia which in the best case pays taxes and in the worst case has Kremlin/military involvement). This has been a contention debate for awoke, you can search their forum and discord for more details.
dzonga 11mo ago
yep Yandex all days when I wanna wear an eye patch and pirate the seas.
- smcin 11mo ago
  Hmm, Yandex Ad Network is allowed monetize western e-commerce sites, they divested their Russian assets by 2024.
bad_username 11mo ago
[flagged]
- socrateswasone 11mo ago
  Oooh scary, watch out for the Russian Boogeyman!
  - nozzlegear 11mo ago
    This but unironically
- someperson 11mo ago
  For what it's worth, this is my first pro-Yandex comment after 17 years on Hacker News. It's a major tech company service based in Russia, so presumably controlled by the government of Russia. But the results produces for a query like "watch (obscure movie) online stream" are far better than what Google or Bing produces. If you need to check a scene of a specific episode of an obscure TV show, it's the fastest method (but happy to hear alternatives). Also, the websites it links to aren't operated by the government of Russia.
- noosphr 11mo ago
  Genuine question: what can go wrong?
  - t-3 11mo ago
    The damn commies will destroy our film industry and blackmail pirates into revealing classified information! Or maybe nothing.
- devsda 11mo ago
  Where I am, both yandex and Google are services from a foreign land. I can't say about Yandex because I haven't used it much, but I have used Google and its services enough to know that it may appear neutral but its services do reflect politics of its origin country. For an outsider, I doubt Yandex is going to be any different than Google in those matters.
egorfine 11mo ago
As a Ukrainian I cannot feel anything but hatred towards the propaganda machine Yandex has become. As an engineer I cannot feel anything but respect to the multi-decade research legacy of the company and their incredible search engine.
probably_wrong 11mo ago
This has been my search engine quality test for quite some time. A good search engine will show you pirate websites because they have a comprehensive index. A great search engine will put them at the top of the list ahead of the fake results. A great search engine that endures long enough attracts the type of attention that forces them to delist those results. Once you can no longer find that type of results you know it's time to look somewhere else.
extraduder_ire 11mo ago
I started using yandex when searching for bittorrent infohashes (to find other trackers it might be indexed on) after google, bing, and duckduckgo all stopped returning good results a few years ago. I know there's multiple full string matches out there, but all I can see on the first few pages are very short partial matches from various blockchain explorers like etherscan. I don't know if this was an intentional decision, or a result of them trying to find fuzzy matches, but they fail at this usecase regardless.
- gosub100 11mo ago
  That is brilliant, to search for the hash values. Thanks
whatamidoingyo 11mo ago
Funny you say this. Just two days ago, my wife was telling me a little history about her country, and suggested a movie based on those events. I couldn't find it on Google, DDG, Bing, Brave, etc. So I tried it on Yandex and it appeared as a top 3 result. Btw, DDG basically looked exactly like Google. And now they have "sponsored" items...
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]

negativelambda 11mo ago

I just tested, indeed very good results!

chneu 11mo ago

I've been playing around with a variety of search engines such as Kagi, Startpage, Ecosia, DDG. All of them are better than google in finding relevant results. Lol Google is way too "personalized".

qiqitori 11mo ago
You can turn off personalization. (Operating under the assumption that most people search for facts, I personally don't see why one would ever want personalized results.)
- skulk 11mo ago
  > I personally don't see why one would ever want personalized results. The same short combination of words can mean very different things to different people. My favorite example of this is "C string" because when I was a kid learning C I was introduced to a whole new class of lingerie because Google didn't really personalize results back then. Now when I search "C string" Google knows exactly what I mean.
- Ariarule 11mo ago
  I won't bother defending Google-style personalization as it exists for their search results, but since collisions in terminology across fields are common, it's not that hard to see how actual, thoughtful personalization could be useful. Someone searching for "Kafka" is going to want very different results based on whether they're thinking of software or literature. Opinions may also differ over the usefulness of sources, even for people ultimately interested primarily in facts; I find Kagi-style personalization (make your own domain list) very useful, but across Kagi's userbase Reddit is simultaneously one of the most lowered, most raised, and most pinned domains: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard
  - dboreham 11mo ago
    > Kafka" is going to want very different results based on whether they're thinking of software or literature. Speak for yourself. I've worked in several "Kafka-esque" software organizations.
    - dotancohen 11mo ago
      Arguably Google SERPs are getting closer to The Trial.
  - p1necone 11mo ago
    Anecdotally I find myself appending 'reddit' to search terms very frequently. It's effectively shorthand for "I want to read about peoples direct experience with this thing", and reddit is huge and well crawled by search engines. It's astroturfed to hell especially around political topics, but I feel like it's easy to tell when discussions about random products are authentic.
- p1necone 11mo ago
  Location based personalization is pretty useful - if I search for 'Bob's Discount Linguine' I want the one in my neighborhood. Lots of niche things (like programming) also reuse common english words to mean specific things - if I search e.g. 'locking' it's nice to get results related to asynchronous programming instead of locksmiths because google knows I regularly search for programming related terminology. Of course it's questionable whether google does a good job at any of this, but I absolutely see the value.
  - skydhash 11mo ago
    I just add another keyword to narrow the search result. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted results based on anything other than the query.
  - throwaway-0001 11mo ago
    Can you show me what results you see for “locking”? I see dancing move in all profiles I have.
    - smcin 11mo ago
      Wow you're right. Locking dance moves and videos. Weere you expecting to see padlocks or doorlocks or what?
      - throwaway-0001 11mo ago
        I expected to be “personalized”. I’m definitely more into programming than dancing. I see 0 personalization tbh. And I tried a few different peoples phones.
        smcin 11mo ago
        Oh I see, locking in the programming sense, yes. Either not every search term is personalized for your context, or else this particular search is being applied to some other demographic. But that's weird because "locking" doesn't also show door, windows, filing cabinets. Anyway if you search for "programming locking" you get relevant results. Google didn't used to do this. Anyone got a rough idea when this started?
- smcin 11mo ago
  Some people search for shopping, or business details, in which case personalization can improve (or disimprove) result relevance based on knowing where you currently are, what day and time it is, what you tend to order etc. etc. And some people search for songs/images/videos/books/articles.
mtillman 11mo ago
Google hides the most relevant results on the 3rd page. It was confirmed in trial disclosures a few months ago. Their concern isn’t public search.
- nine_k 11mo ago
  Seems to not be empirically true.
- superkuh 11mo ago
  Google only ever returns a maximum of <400 results. If you actually click through at 100/page, you'll only get 3.something pages of results. Despite what is says at the top re: results. Those results are not accessible. Bing only returns 900. Kagi only 200. Deep search and surfing is pretty much gone on all major search "engines".
  - locknitpicker 11mo ago
    > Google only ever returns a maximum of <400 results. That's perfectly fine. If I'm going to use a search engine, I'm not willing to sift through hundreds of potentially relevant results. I hope I find what I'm searching for in the first page, or at best in the first 3 pages or so. What's not cool about Google is that now it hits you with AI slop with dubious quality right at the top, followed by a page of sponsored results, followed by some potentially useful results, followed by an entire ocean of spam traps and clone sites and really shady results with exotic never-seen-before TLDs that leaves you wondering whether clicking on a link will get in a hostile database. That's what's not cool about Google: is that you can't use it to search the web anymore.
    - mschuster91 11mo ago
      It's not Google's fault alone. SEO manipulation for example, that could be tackled by our legal system similar to existing slander, unfair competition and advertising regulations. But unfortunately, most representatives are not digital natives but old digital buffoons, and the post-2000/Gen Z kids never gained an understanding of what actually makes the web tick. As for the TLD explosion, we definitely need a completely new setup for ICANN. The trouble all of that has caused, just for a measly 250k in fees for each new gTLD, is insane.
TranquilMarmot 11mo ago
I switched to Kagi a while back and ended up buying their annual subscription for unlimited searches. It's such a breath of fresh air, like a search engine from an alternate universe where Google just focused on search instead of adtech.
mrweasel 11mo ago
The fact that Google seemingly returns results worse than Kagi, Startpage and Ecosia is just strange, given that Google provides search results for all three of them. Both Kagi and Ecosia uses other sources as well, I don't know about Startpage, so that's certainly part of it, but it still feels a little strange. From using Ecosia, DuckDuckGo and Bing, I'd also argue that Bing is simply a better search engine at this point.
- TurboSkyline 11mo ago
  Don’t Ecosia/Qwant have their own index now? Do you find Bing better through Bing proper, or just as good through DDG (which uses the Bing index)?
  - mrweasel 11mo ago
    Last I read the Ecosia/Qwant index is only used in German and French, so I think Ecosia is still running their weird Bing/Google/Other mix. Bing felt about as good as Ecosia, until Ecosia started to mix in the Google results. At that point Ecosia became they better search engine. Bing vs. DDG, I'd say about the same. I stopped trying to use Bing once they rolled out all the Copilot nonsense. Now the UI is unusable and cluttered.
spragl 11mo ago
DDG is okay. Startpage is quite good. I make a virtue of regularly shifting between search engines (not Google). Sometimes they are not so good, some times very good. On average Im sure my search experience is better than using Google.
somenameforme 11mo ago
Brave search is also quite nice: https://search.brave.com/ https://search.brave.com/ I find Google to generally have some of the worst search results of modern engines with one exception - Google tends to be good at digging up results from things like forums/message boards that don't end up getting listed on other search engines. I don't entirely understand why this is because other engines also have them indexed and work fine with something like: 'site:news.ycombinator.com anna's archive' [1][2] but yet those posts will basically never show up on the main results, regardless of how far down them you go. [1] - https://search.brave.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+anna%27s+archive https://search.brave.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.co... [2] - https://yandex.com/search/?text=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+anna%27s+archive https://yandex.com/search/?text=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+...
admaiora 11mo ago
I believe Kagi uses the Yandex index as their base as well.
- DanOpcode 11mo ago
  Based on what? Have you read that somewhere?
  - quinncom 11mo ago
    Yandex is one of Kagi's index sources. They used to publish a list of their sources but have changed it to a generic "we use multiple sources" because they got so much shit for using Brave (because of its founder’s bigotry) and Yandex (because of the ethical dilemma of paying a company headquartered in Russia which in the best case pays taxes and in the worst case has Kremlin/military involvement). This has been a contention debate for awoke, you can search their forum and discord for more details.

dzonga 11mo ago

yep Yandex all days when I wanna wear an eye patch and pirate the seas.

smcin 11mo ago
Hmm, Yandex Ad Network is allowed monetize western e-commerce sites, they divested their Russian assets by 2024.

bad_username 11mo ago

[flagged]

socrateswasone 11mo ago
Oooh scary, watch out for the Russian Boogeyman!
- nozzlegear 11mo ago
  This but unironically
someperson 11mo ago
For what it's worth, this is my first pro-Yandex comment after 17 years on Hacker News. It's a major tech company service based in Russia, so presumably controlled by the government of Russia. But the results produces for a query like "watch (obscure movie) online stream" are far better than what Google or Bing produces. If you need to check a scene of a specific episode of an obscure TV show, it's the fastest method (but happy to hear alternatives). Also, the websites it links to aren't operated by the government of Russia.
noosphr 11mo ago
Genuine question: what can go wrong?
- t-3 11mo ago
  The damn commies will destroy our film industry and blackmail pirates into revealing classified information! Or maybe nothing.
devsda 11mo ago
Where I am, both yandex and Google are services from a foreign land. I can't say about Yandex because I haven't used it much, but I have used Google and its services enough to know that it may appear neutral but its services do reflect politics of its origin country. For an outsider, I doubt Yandex is going to be any different than Google in those matters.

egorfine 11mo ago

As a Ukrainian I cannot feel anything but hatred towards the propaganda machine Yandex has become. As an engineer I cannot feel anything but respect to the multi-decade research legacy of the company and their incredible search engine.

probably_wrong 11mo ago

This has been my search engine quality test for quite some time. A good search engine will show you pirate websites because they have a comprehensive index. A great search engine will put them at the top of the list ahead of the fake results. A great search engine that endures long enough attracts the type of attention that forces them to delist those results. Once you can no longer find that type of results you know it's time to look somewhere else.

extraduder_ire 11mo ago

I started using yandex when searching for bittorrent infohashes (to find other trackers it might be indexed on) after google, bing, and duckduckgo all stopped returning good results a few years ago. I know there's multiple full string matches out there, but all I can see on the first few pages are very short partial matches from various blockchain explorers like etherscan. I don't know if this was an intentional decision, or a result of them trying to find fuzzy matches, but they fail at this usecase regardless.

gosub100 11mo ago
That is brilliant, to search for the hash values. Thanks

whatamidoingyo 11mo ago

Funny you say this. Just two days ago, my wife was telling me a little history about her country, and suggested a movie based on those events. I couldn't find it on Google, DDG, Bing, Brave, etc. So I tried it on Yandex and it appeared as a top 3 result. Btw, DDG basically looked exactly like Google. And now they have "sponsored" items...

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]