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I feel like a crazy person, but I've been using Yandex as the last resort and having positive results in finding stuff that I know is out there but Google has d
by RankingMember 5mo ago
I feel like a crazy person, but I've been using Yandex as the last resort and having positive results in finding stuff that I know is out there but Google has decided to stop letting me see. (I tried DDG but for my use it's been worse than Google).
- siva7 5mo agoNah you're not crazy. I also felt crazy when i discovered that some obscure censored russian search engine gives me overall better search results in 2026 than google.com
- ai_slop_hater 5mo agoIt's not "obscure." Yandex is Russia's Google.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- pooploop64 5mo agoThis is a funny (if it wasn't so sad) aspect of enshittification that was revealed to me through Chinese electronics. There is a line we cross where the lowest quality, most bottom dollar crap is actually better than it's actively malicious "premium" counterparts. It's like if a company spent billions of dollars creating the most perfect hammer that also happens to make itself bend to miss nails if you don't use the approved Hammertech GripGlove that plays ads and is slippery. Or you could use a random rock with a flat side, which is a much better hammer than that in every way. In the exact same fashion, Yandex blows Google out of the water. Not because they have smarter people running it or because the code is more elegant or because they have more money. They just don't have the means or motivation to actively screw with you to the same degree as Google, and that makes it better. Anyone at this point could make a better search engine than google just by running a basic text search algorithm and not doing anything else, it just so happens that Yandex never bothered to go as far beyond that as the mainstream ones.
- alberto-m 5mo agoYandex is not obscure, nor “lowest quality, most bottom dollar crap”. It has very good technology behind, though not the trillion dollars of investments Google can afford. Just because it does not come from California it does not mean it's a hobby project anyone could replicate.
- cnd78A 5mo ago[flagged]
- oliculipolicula 5mo ago>"obscure censored russian search engine" Is probably the Sputnik though commenters mistake it for backhanded-diss of Yandex. Conjures an alternative universe where Russian potatocraft lands live lobsters on Mars before Elon's spacesedan reaches Mars orbit. I am intrigued by the possibility of minimalist defo of "enshittification" that tweaks "the purpose of a system is what it does". "The purpose of a search engine system is to keep you searching" etc
- andrekandre 5mo ago[dead]
- tardedmeme 5mo agoI think this way about Marginalia Search. It's just a search engine someone threw up for the sake of making a search engine and by the sake of merely not being crap it's actually pretty decent if the thing you're looking for is in its index set (lots of tech stuff). I think the most impactful thing is that it doesn't index seoslop.
- ttoinou 5mo agoYandex is big and has probably good engineers
- amelius 5mo agoI suspect it has more to do with incentives.
- seviu 5mo agoNot crazy, I always resort to yandex when I know google is not showing me the results I am looking for DDG doesn’t click for me sadly, and I cannot point my finger to where or why
- muppetman 5mo agoA bet the stupid name doesn’t help. I know what you mean though, I use it but it’s never quite right. Hard to say exactly why.
- pooploop64 5mo agoMy sister thought it was malware when she was seeing ads for it. Something about the whole overall branding is just bad.
- yegg 5mo agoSorry you feel that way, pooploop64. We are doing a complete brand refresh this year though.
- flir 5mo agoSomeone round here said Yandex shows you what you searched for, while Google shows you what it thinks you should have searched for.