Yandex CEO Resigns
Simon Sharwood (Yandex, Hacker News):
Arkady Volozh, CEO of Russia’s biggest internet company Yandex, has resigned after being added to the European Union’s list of individuals sanctioned as part of its response to the illegal invasion of Ukraine.
Yandex is an analogue of Google, having started as a search engine and then added numerous productivity, cloud, and social services.
[…]
The document also accuses Yandex of “promoting State media and narratives in its search results, and deranking and removing content critical of the Kremlin, such as content related to Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.”
Reuters (via Hacker News):
Volozh, who co-founded the Yandex search engine in 1997, was put under EU sanctions on Friday after the bloc accused him of “materially or financially” supporting Russia, which sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24.
Yandex does one thing that most other search engines refuse to do: search for hashes. If you take a hash and put it into Google, Bing, etc. they basically refuse to search for it unless it’s a “well known” hash.
Previously:
- DuckDuckGo Will Down-Rank Russian Disinformation Sites
- Apple Halts Sales in Russia
- Comparison of Reverse Image Search Engines
4 Comments RSS · Twitter
@Scineram: They wrote some really interesting papers about the algorithms they use. I don't see why they'd bother to write in English in the future, which will be a loss.
Yandex has many technologies that are amazingly good. For example Alisa, its voice assistant is way way better than Siri and even Google Assistant in many regards. Browser is really good, and they offer real-time dubbed translations for youtube videos. etc.
And recently they were forced to sell many of their products to various government-affiliated players, which obviously is a play on using their brand recognition to serve belligerent purposes. The company and its technology are being destroyed, but that's probably inevitable in the current situation.
I'm sure that the vast majority of employees and management are truly anti-war and anti-gov. But that is what it is.
@Dmitry
I had never heard of Alice. Thanks for the reference:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_(virtual_assistant)
I like the way they started by training it on Gogol, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky!
Yandex image recognition is incredible that Google image search can only dream about.