Today I learned that Kagi uses Yandex as part of its search infrastructure, making up about 2% of their costs, and their CEO has confirmed that they do not plan to change that.

To quote:

Yandex represents about 2% of our total costs and is only one of dozens of sources we use. To put this in perspective: removing any single source would degrade search quality for all users while having minimal economic impact on any particular region.

The world doesn’t need another politicized search engine. It needs one that works exceptionally well, regardless of the political climate. That’s what we’re building.

That is unfortunate, as I found Kagi to be a good product with an interesting take on utilizing LLM models with search that is kind of useful, but I cannot in good heart continue to support it while they unapologetically finance a major company that has ties to the Russian government, the same country that is actively waging a war against Ukraine, an European country, for over 11 years, during which they’ve committed countless war crimes against civilians and military personnel.

Kagi has the freedom to decide how they build the best search engine, and I have the freedom to use something else.

Please send all your whataboutisms to /dev/null.