> For image search, Uruky currently integrates Pixabay and Serper (image results).
With Uruky, these customers can now move on instead, and the lower price will serve as another reason. And then they also don't have to worry anymore that their accountant is going to call at 3AM and demand that they "justify" the gigantic subscription cost.
And Kagi can focus on the only real selling point they have: Search results quality. Which is where their future lies and what most potential customers are looking to pay for. Not being anti-Google.
On the other hand Kagi is an American company so is at the very least abiding by US sanctions.
But I agree, we should be more vigilant about who and what our money supports.
It is especially logical to "discriminate" corporations which are not corrupt monopolies entwined with corrupt governments. Boycotting FAANG corpos is as pointless as it is impossible. The only reaction one may get from those is dead silence. Boycotting Kagi and publicly shaming them, may make them wake up and correct their misguided ways. For example, after years of nagging and shaming, DuckDuckGo has cut ties with Ruzzians. So that sometimes does work.
If you do something in this world and this life - remember you normally have about 70 years - there is always some detail of what you're doing that is worthy of criticism, shunning, and shaming. Since everything in the world is connected, you can't avoid it.
If however you do nothing in your life or with your life, then there is also nothing which you can be criticized for doing. And you can never be criticized for not doing something. When you die after a life toting the line and having the allowed opinion on every subject and shunning people who do things; then you go to European heaven - which is an eternity of committee meetings in Brüssels.
It's not about moral superiority, just about awareness of the choices we make. I have several friends that don't do the "Bali" summer holiday thing anymore even though they would like to and can afford it. Because Greece is also fun and wastes a lot of less fuel.
I like this better than the current American approach of: "We know it's bad for the environment so we will do it as much as possible to extract more profit than others before the world becomes uninhabitable. Then we will have WON!"
That being said Kagi -> Yandex hop does indeed make it indirect.
(I too have stopped using Kagi after I found out that they pay Yandex and employ people who support Russian war).
Yandex was split for a while into a Russian-controlled part and an independent part in the Netherlands, controlled by the original co-founder, which later become Nebius AI. Nowadays, these entities are completely detached, and Arkady Volozh has renounced his Russian citizenship.
There's also the geopolitical issues, which I'll skip over because similar concerns can be leveled at other indexes too. I posted about that on the Kagi feedback forums back in 2024:
https://kagifeedback.org/d/4727-option-to-choose-or-exclude-...
I since built my own metasearch engine for my own use, where I choose the external indexes used, and I'm much happier. I started building a personal index of the web as well. I haven't used Kagi or Google for over a year now.
I hope I'm not distracting from Bruno's Uruky project here. Not everyone is technical enough to spin up some PHP code and make their own metasearch, or spin up a VPS and install a SearxNG instance. There's value in providing a good user experience for less technical users, in building resilience by using multiple indexes & building your own, and reducing dependencies on external index APIs that may cut off your access (coffgooglebingcoff). I'm glad services like Uruky exist.
I am Russian and I do oppose Putin’s regime. My family is in Russia, though. If I send them money (which), and they pay for, say, groceries, which are taxed, some tiny part of my money will be used to fund the regime and the war. I am very disappointed but there is no way for me to just yank all my family and friends and relocate them to a less fucked-up jurisdiction.
Doing business with Yandex is a whole other beast. Kagi can choose to use a worse search engine API which doesn’t involve paying money to a Russian company. Are there some market forces at hand here? Maybe a lot of Russian expats pay for Kagi because it has good Russian-language results? I don’t know.
Edit:
> But is Yandex government owned?
It isn’t, but I really doubt it has no ties with it. It would be interesting to trace and see if Yandex Cloud’s international branch money gets back to its Russian counterpart, or if they are two separate things.
If I knew someone was sending money to Russia, I would of course avoid any contact (let alone financial ties) with them.
In fact, yes. Yandex is totally controlled by Putin's presidential administration.
> What about Russians abroad that send money back home to their families
It doesn't seem like a significant factor. The main flow of money into Russia are payments for fossil fuel and trade balance with China.