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Comment by flymaipie | Hacker News Reader

Is there any sensible explanation why Kagi does funding Yandex? It seems weird to me.

Yandex isn't on any sanctions list as far as I know, so Kagi is free to do business with Yandex. Yandex did need to reorganize (as their Dutch tax avoidance parent company was obviously causing them issues) but looking at https://ir.yandex/press-releases?year=2024&id=05-02-2024 it seems like all of Yandex has been sold to a generic Russian investment fund.

Legally, Kagi can buy access to Yandex' API. Whether they should is a matter of opinion. It's the main reason I haven't tried Kagi yet, and probably never will, as the owners don't seem to have a problem with any of it.

Legally they can. But we all know that Yandex had always had very strong ties with the Russian government. I used to work for Yandex for more than 6 years in early 2010s and even then there were signs of the state trying to influence it through censoring Yandex.News and various other means. And these days you have to be very naive to assume that it is not controlled by the state and people close to it.

> Is there any sensible explanation why Kagi does funding Yandex?

They want access to Yandex's index. Given the quality of Kagi's results, I trust them with that call. Despite the Ukraine war being of deep personal interest to me.

They use their image search results, and according to CEO it sums up to 2% of their costs. I saw an explanation post in their forum about this issue, but can‘t find it right now.

They pay for search results to search providers because Kagi doesn't have an index of their own.

In the link above they say they added Yandex Image search as a provider.

It’s not funding, it’s paying for a service.

Funding does not imply a lack of receiving something in return, only a flow of money. It can be both

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