I'd be more than willing to subscribe and support the project BUT, I need to address the elephant in the room: The reason why I'm against Kagi is the fact that they use Yandex(be it only for images according to their own words) and I'm sure as hell refusing to give a single cent to them. So I guess my question is: sources?
> For web search, Uruky currently integrates Mojeek, Marginalia, EUSP (Ecosia/Qwant) (only works with French, German, or English), Linkup, Serper, and Uruky Site Search.
> For image search, Uruky currently integrates Pixabay and Serper (image results).
Kagi seems unfairly picked on here. Lots of people do business with Russia. Multiple EU countries import gas from Russia which, the UK just dropped sanctions on Russian oil, lots of countries do not have sanctions on Russia at all so buying things from those countries might involve money ending up going to Russia.
On the other hand Kagi is an American company so is at the very least abiding by US sanctions.
I'm not claiming it's an infallible system and that no single cent of my money goes to Russia. I just do what's within my powers based on the information I have.
In my circles, Europe's (continuing) dependency on Russian fossil fuels is discussed often and at length. This being a tech forum, it's to be expected that conversations would revolve around tech products like Kagi. Off the top of my head, Russian connections are also brought up in relation to OnlyOffice and Telegram.
But I agree, we should be more vigilant about who and what our money supports.
It is maybe unconventional in a public discourse but I believe that it is completely fine for an individual human to "discriminate" anything multiple orders of magnitude more powerful, richer and more unaccountable to him/her than a human. For example - a billionaire, a corporation, a country, a block, an alliance, a military or mercenary unit and so on. Just because there are some other baddies around it is totally okay for an individual to boycott one of several selected baddies. Sure, it is a "discrimination" and it's fine. The power imbalance dictates that it is both ethical and logical thing to do.
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.
That is a tough position, I don't have a definitive answer. Perhaps you could look at supporting non-US and non-Russian companies building their own search indexes? Not sure what the state of Ecosia and Qwant's European Search Perspective is these days, but that's an option.
There's little future in catering to customers who come to you only because they hate Google. They will soon find a reason to hate you and fill up your support forums and Discord with complaints. After all, they are spending the gigantic amount of $10 per month on your service, and have a right to influence the company.
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.
What's wrong with Yandex? Is it quality of service being too low? Does the company have tracking records of shady practices, worst than what GAFAM are doing that make customer flee away?
In my experience, Yandex was feeding in a lot of low quality results into Kagi - lots of pirated software, shady websites, proxy duplicate copycat sites, content that I'll euphemistically call "free speech". Kagi has a domain blacklist feature, but I was starting to fill up my blocklist - I think it's capped at 1000 domains, and many of these sites spin up new domains specifically to get around blocklists.
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:
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.
Main feature of urky seems to really be privacy. on my own searxNG i would be all the traffic. If I ho through urky hopefully I can hide with traffic from other users.
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.
Their support agent in the forum very unambiguously answered to one of the early complaints about the Yandex thing with "Our opinion about war differs", I nope'd out right there and then
Yes, and a lot of EU citizens/companies are actively in the process of migrating away from US based software/products to EU alternatives for, among others, this exact reason.
I'll give you an introduction to Modern European Ethics™:
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 really a thing. We all know flying is a really bad thing and still the skies are full of planes also in Europe. It's just an extra factor to take into account. Like, when you can choose another solution that does not have this factor.
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!"
But is Yandex government owned? What about Russians abroad that send money back home to their families, and a percentage of that ends up going via taxes to Putin? Are we boycotting all Russians everywhere globally?
I think the OP’s point still stands, but it is a fairly weak argument.
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.
Your stance seems to be that interacting with any Russian means supporting genocide, regardless of if they support Putin. Which is so absurd as to be likely ragebait. So yes, it’s a quality issue :)
And if you’re discriminating against all Russians based on their government, even though not all Russians support Putin, then that is unfortunately just racism.
I see. To summarize, you believe all Russians are bad because a Russian person killed your friend and all Americans are good because no American people killed any of your friends?
Is it really that hard to believe people don't want to support a state that has brutally occupied half of Europe for 50 years and is right now murdering Ukrainians every day?
Russia is waging a hybrid war against Europe (and the West in general), there's no way I'd give one of their biggest tech companies even a cent.
The world also consists of people. Are you saying that people around me are better than the Russians? Sure, nice to have finally agree about something.
But that just proves the point you were trying to argue with.
No, you misread. I didn't say people around you are better; I said you probably live in a country with working government institutions and fair elections.
I don't feel you approach this discussion in good faith. I see no point in continuing.
It is silly to grant agency and moral responsibility exclusively to people living within democracies.
The Putin regime made an informal deal with the population "You stay out of politics and we're gonna stay out of your life". The people outsource political power to the regime.
This passive majority represents the bulk of the population, but not the whole of the population. There are two smaller groups. Ultra-patriots who criticize Putin for not doing more war, more suffering etc. And those who criticize the Putin for the war, although this group is not very vocal, but here I do agree with you that's it's difficult to publicly protest in an authoritarian regime.
You can hate ALL Russians all you want but it's not whataboutism to call you out on the hypocritical and hateful position you take.
Saying you have issue with not only a country but all it's people and their offerings because of the countries effects on friends and families just means in the case of the US, that you have no friends that are:
Black Americans, Native Americans, Latino Americans, pretty much all of South Americans, large portions Africans, the Balkans, Vietnamise, Most of the Arab countries etc?
Surely the rational position to take is to hate the countries policies not all their citizens. I also dislike Russia policies but boycutting or hating the creator of 7 Zip because he is Russian seems weird.
