Yandex is a genuinely good alternative. For text search, it isn't overly censored in relation to DMCA risks. Appending terms like 'torrent' actually work. For exact text searching, I found Yandex results to be better.
And Yandex is leagues ahead of Google and Bing in terms of reverse image search.
Google is generally better if you have a more abstract or conceptual query, or if you're not sure what
the best term would be.
Baidu is fully integrated into the Party's censorship apparatus and delivers absolutely nothing of use for many categories of query. Couldn't even search for wrist watches for a while.
Comrade, I have personally tried that search engine and found it similar in quality to Bing with just a hint of added excitement from the fear in the back of my mind.
I met the Yandex CEO and CTO in Moscow back in June of 2006 at their headquarters, scouting them out as a Firefox search partner. They had real tech and capable people back then and over the years they got better and better. We eventually signed them as our default in Russia where their native language advantage was a clear win over Google. I still use them occasionally today and find their search to be a solid product.
I would not be surprised if there is some astroturfing going on.
But I've personally found that Yandex to give better search results than Google on some topics. But I also don't trust the company and assume that everything they make has FSB backdoors in it.
Do your own comparison and see it for yourself. It has nothing to do with astroturfing. Google has become objectively bad at search. The results speak for itself.
