Microsoft Edge sets Yandex as default search engine in Moldova
twitter.comMicrosoft signed a deal in 2015 to set Yandex as the default search engine in several countries close to Russia. The article mentions "Kazakhstan, Turkey, and Ukraine". The list is not exhaustive, as I know about Moldova and Georgia. https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-partners-russias-ya...
The list includes Ukraine! I've tested Edge with Ukraine as a Region on my MacOS, and it no longer appears to set it to Yandex.
But it still does for several other countries. Which includes Moldova. Moldova is a country that Russia has repeatedly threatened. While advanced users may try and remove Yandex as default, non-tech savvy users likely leave the defaults.
Meaning Microsoft Edge shares data with Russia by setting Yandex as a default search engine for their users, which is really bad.
Please upvote this story to give it visibility. Many thanks!
Thank goodness edge's market share is very low in these countries. About 2% for Moldova [1].
For MSFT, this is a huge embarrassment, reminiscent of Google's infamous "project dragonfly".
And they deleted your inquiry on their forums for "violating the community guidelines"! Not exactly PR geniuses, are they?
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/moldova
I wonder how accurate those numbers are about Edge. As 79.48% of desktop users in Moldova are on Windows 10 and Windows 11. [1]
Microsoft Edge is the default web browser on Windows 10, Windows 11. [2]
Meaning at a huge amount of population will see Yandex when they search for something at least for the first time. Unless they install another browser immediately or change the default search engine.
And yes, I wasn't expecting to see my inquiry deleted on their forum. I'm posting again without the screenshot. In case they didn't like what Yandex returns as results (which is weird, as it is their "business partner").
I'm also very humbled by the support of the hacker news community. As a long time lurker, it warms my heart a lot to see so much support. I hope it reaches Microsoft.
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/windows/d...
Defaults don't matter as much as we all pretend they do.
For the decade that Internet Explorer sucked basically all computer users got programmed to treat it like a Chrome/Firefox downloader. Most users don't know that Edge is Microsoft flavored Chrome now, so they continue to use Edge to download other browsers and move on with their lives.
This is an unpopular opinion, but IE4 and especially IE5 were significantly better than what Mozilla/Netscape were putting out at the time. This is what grew their marketshare more than the bundling that everyone focused on. Then Microsoft sat on IE6 for years and let it fall way behind everyone else. IE7 was basically IE6 with tabs. By the time they began investing in their own browser again it was largely too late.
It's bizarre that the nixed Project Dragonfly is a considered a bigger embarrassment than Bing working continuously to this day in China.
I made the comparison with Dragonfly because they had special features planned to make users more easily identifiable for the PRC government, thus the similarity with this MSFT/Yandex situation.
Are you aware of Bing doing anything like this? (I think it's bad enough that they take part in censorship, don't get me wrong.)
Whatever Google was doing with Dragonfly was to comply and gain re-entry to China, we can assume Bing has to do whatever Google was supposed to do.
Edge is so irrelevant, that you have to wonder why everyone's obsessing with MS's recent moves with it.
It's <5% (and decreasing, still pretty quickly).
> It's <5% (and decreasing, still pretty quickly).
How many tens of millions of irrelevant users does that represent?
5% and shrinking is 5% and shrinking.
If you start with a gigantic number - even 0.1% of is going to still be gigantic.
It doesn't make it really matter in the grand scheme of things.
And once you go to Yandex search page, it will spam you to death to install Yandex browser, which will automatically install Russian government CA certificates, allowing them to spy on all your web traffic!
If I understand correctly, they can only spy on you if they have full access to your traffic, including the ability to modify it, in order to carry out a MITM attack.
They can only spy on you if you use these certificates e.g. visit government sites.
You've chosen a wrong place to disinform. Tech people understand that having russian CA certificates installed allows russia to MITM all your traffic, if they can access it.
Incredibly damning of Microsoft if they were making deals after 2014 to help the Russian aggression against Ukraine.
That they would still be participating in this deal is even worse.
Ukraine banned yandex in 2017 for mass data harvesting of Ukrainians, probably that's the main reason why gp did not find it in Ukrainian Bing. It's still possible and perfectly legal to access yandex or other data harvesting engines/disinfo websites over VPN or Tor, so the ban main objective is to protect non-tech-savvy users from the interference of hostile foreign criminals.
Not sure why the downvotes, as, yes, Yandex along with several other russian internet service companies is blocked in Ukraine and it is almost certainly why it is not being set as default, because doing so would straight up break search altogether.
> The list includes Ukraine! I've tested Edge with Ukraine as a Region on my MacOS, and it no longer appears to set it to Yandex.
Yandex has been banned in Ukraine for some time now, so no point for MS to still have it as default search.
I love it how Russians paid Microsoft to make Russian search engine default in Ukraine, without asking Ukrainians, and nobody in Microsoft thought there's anything wrong with that.
Unitedstatians from Google pay Unitedstatians from Apple to make Google default search engine for all of the world, without asking anyone, do you consider this a problem too?
Russian government != Yandex. They did business in Ukraine and worldwide. Don't see the reason why Microsoft or any other enterprise would need to consult the nation as a whole on which business decision to take.
To my understanding, Yandex is nowadays based in the Netherlands.
It's the same thing as company being based on Cayman Islands, it's mostly on paper really. Most of their offices, and human force are located in russia, in 2009 they sold golden share for 1 eur to the russian goverment(which allows to temporarily suspend the head of Yandex among other "benefits"), yeah and CEO(was resigned in dec 2022) and several other people from the board members are sanctioned by the West.
> "As founder and CEO of Yandex, he is supporting, materially or financially, the Government of the Russian Federation and is responsible for supporting actions or policies which undermine or threaten the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine," the EU's listing states.
> 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."
from: https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/06/yandex_ceo_arkady_vol...
Yeah and they are going to change the formals too - Yandex NV(based in Netherlands) is considering turning the main part of the business into a separate Russian group https://newsunrolled.com/economy/132317.html
Not after the war. Yandex had it's parent company which was headquartered in the Netherlands removed from operations and instead a new company headed by Aleksei Kudrin, a longtime confidant of President Vladimir Putin was put in charge.
Love the down votes. Sorry about reality guys. You're probably just supporting innocent/aligned in thought Russian programmers:
https://ain.capital/2023/01/27/yandex-developers-used-racist...
Given MSFT's troubled history with browsers, it is amazing how one product, one group, can continue to produce one PR black eye after another in the modern era.
Between integrating predatory BNPL, the microsoft-edge: overriding default browser nonsense, injecting ads on the Chrome site, and now this ... one has to wonder, is this all some joke?
Either Satya and friends are asleep at the broser wheel, or the whole subject is too annoying/toxic for them to address directly.
I see often enough cyrillic street names in Google Maps or Street View in Germany using Windows in Germany with regional settings for one of former soviet “republics”. Tried to report it to Google but nobody cares despite russian language and cyrillic writings have nothing in common with my regional settings.
As I said somewhere else on this site, don't expect people raised in pleasant SV to understand the complexities of modern world.
I use yandex over google/bing. Works well for western censored content - however it does have a clear disinfo bent for english language searches. I still prefer it over google simply because it returns results like google used to in 2010 or so lol. Give it a go, you'll see what I mean.
I use Yandex sometimes for the same reasons, it is like Google from 2010, image search still works and old personal websites are still indexed. Is Yandex still Russian company or is it detached from Russia like Jetbrains and Telegram?
They never released any official statements condemning the war or leaving russia, none of their services were shut down there, and they still actively hiring new people in russia. Yandex services is also widely known for spreading pro-war propaganda, disinformation and fakes while censoring opposition media: https://meduza.io/feature/2023/01/30/yandeks-blokiroval-izob...,
https://meduza.io/news/2022/03/01/yandeks-segodnya-klyuchevo...
Yandex used to pretend they are a global company (even had an office in Silicon Valley) but in 2022 this came to an end, as you cannot run business in both Russia and civilized world at the same time. So, Yandex is now Russian and thus controlled by the same thugs that control everything else there.
Yandex had it's parent company which was headquartered in the Netherlands removed from operations and instead a new company headed by Aleksei Kudrin, a longtime confidant of President Vladimir Putin was put in charge.
> Volozh plans to separate the business of unmanned vehicles into a separate structure and develop it in Europe. The rest of Yandex will remain in Russia.
>Works well for western censored content
Not sure if that's what you mean, but Yandex is great for piracy and otherwise illegal content.
Yandex feels like a relatively simple text search with results from a large number of sources, kind of like Google from ~15 years ago. Modern Google instead feels like it gives you what it thinks you "actually" want, with an extreme preference to push you towards a very limited number of heavily weighted sources.
A simple example would be a search for 'russia usa war'. It's the sort of search that's REALLY annoying using something like Google for because, predictably, it gave me nothing but results about Ukraine from large US media outlets. Yandex gave me this [1] pretty informative Wiki entry as the #1 result, and then three pages describing a hypothetical Russia USA war including this [2] interesting looking video (and channel) on YouTube.
Continuing on further down the results you get ever more interesting things like this [3] that suggests Russia was involved in the US Civil War, on the side of the Union! As is always the case for anything, just because it's published - doesn't mean its true. But in this case it does seem to be, which is something I had no clue of even as a history fan! So I just had a TIL in "my" domain, while spending 5 minutes writing this post (and another 30 exploring Russian involvement in the US Civil War). That's why it rocks. Basically it kind of makes the internet feel like the internet again. And that's nice.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_during_the_Russo...
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woD6RYptp58
[3] - https://www.stolenhistory.org/articles/1863-russian-involvem...
Also great for casual racism.
https://www.itpro.com/security/data-breaches/369966/yandex-d...
This is sadly probably a draw for a lot of 'Russian is the only country maintaining traditional western values' types.
If you live in the west, FSB having all your data probably doesn't matter, they have more urgent issues that you. If you live next door to Russia and have Russian troops stationed in part of your county occupied by Russia-supported bandits, your calculus may be a bit different.
> FSB having all your data probably doesn't matter
says who?
It definitely has much better image search than Google.
yandex and RT are the top of rus disinformation and anti-west/divisive content.
I've experienced more divisive content from western media itself than overt anti-west stuff from RT or yandex lmao.
Feel free to move to Russia if you don’t live there already and you’ll no longer have to worry about being exposed to western media!
This is underrated comment. And by looking at the knee-jerk reactions from accounts with 0-10 karma, might just be right on the money.
For me, having moved from the US to eastern Europe has been eye opening in this regard. Based on somewhat shallow sampling of parents of our kids classmates in $$$ IB school, everyone but one seem to be vocal about the fact that everything in the west is from the 'ass'. I admit that it has crossed my mind more than once that if you really feel so strongly this way, or are upset that people don't want to speak russian with you, then why are you still here and not on your way back already?
I thought that moving to another country is a multi-variable problem, but apparently it can be reduced to a single variable problem.
Calm down, captain America. Chill. It's just an opinion and it was not rude.
Oh please, unless you are a complete luddite, you'll get constantly bombarded by it.
Russia has a long standing tradition of expelling dissenters from the country (if murdering them proves inconvenient for some reason). I guess some in the West want to culturally appropriate this tradition. I'd prefer restoring freedom of speech, tbh.
The parent of your comment brings up a valid point though.
The Western media pushing divisive narratives is a major problem, that is already starting to tear apart the social fabric of Western society. I don't know what the solution is, but it sure isn't "herr durr, move to Russia!"
You understand that a cartel of traditional and social media companies worked with the FBI and intelligence agencies to push a false narrative (the fake Steele dossier, paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign) and to suppress a major story about corruption by a Presidential candidate (Hunter Biden's laptop), both of which are straight up election interference. Even if you're a Democrat or a never-Trumper this should outrage you.
I just want to point out that some of the statements in your comment seem to be presented as facts when they are actually heavily disputed.
> "a cartel of traditional and social media companies worked with the FBI and intelligence agencies to push a false narrative (the fake Steele dossier, paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign)"
- while there are differing opinions on the veracity of this claim, it's important to consider the potential implications if it were true. If it were true, it would suggest that the President was compromised and had a conflict of interest between his personal vs the national interest, which is a serious concern.
- Additionally, there are many other instances where the President's conflicts of interest have been on display, such as his actions in Helsinki and his use of the presidency to enrich himself and his associates.
> "and to suppress a major story about corruption by a Presidential candidate (Hunter Biden's laptop)"
- It's worth noting that this claim was heavily promoted by the Trump campaign and lacked substantial evidence.
- And even if the worst version of these claims were true, they would be minor in comparison to other serious allegations against the former President, such as the Zelensky quid pro quo and the use of taxpayer dollars to benefit his businesses.
-- (I'd also add to the broader discussion that)
- While it's true that Western media has made mistakes and increased the spread of divisive content, the narratives about China and Russia are often rooted in solid ideological (or at least mostly self-consistent) principles, such as anti-authoritarianism and free speech.
- The real issue with our media, in my opinion, is its role in amplifying domestic right vs. left divisiveness, which weakens the United States in the world, and is tearing our society apart.
The fact the FB and twitter worked with intelligence and politicians to suppress dissent is not some opinion, it's a documented confirmed fact. Denying the facts is not "opinion" , it's just lying. Same for Hunter laptop BTW- they had the ultimate evidence, the laptop itself. FBI had it, and lied about it. That's a fact. We didn't know it's a fact back in 2020, but now we do. So let's not pretend as there are some matters of opinion here - there are facts, and there are lies.
> the narratives about China and Russia are often rooted in solid ideological (or at least mostly self-consistent) principles, such as anti-authoritarianism and free speech.
Please. It's rooted in competition and antipathy, us vs. them. Let's not kid ourselves.
What I stated is true.
The Dossier is a fake, and it was paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign. The FBI also reached an agreement to pay Cristopher Steele $1 million to continue work on the dossier. Apparently this deal was scrapped and the payment never went through, but again, this is pretty disturbing that it went that far.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/25/us/politics/steele-dossie...
Also, the Hunter Biden laptop has been confirmed to be authentic and not Russian disinformation. The story was originally broken by the NY Post, but it was heavily suppressed by other media outlets and the NY Post’s social media accounts were blocked, as were those of pretty much anyone that attempted to share the story. The Intelligence community worked pretty much in lockstep to discredit the laptop as Russian disinformation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controvers...
(Yes, I know Wikipedia, but the only sources that really reported on it are Conservative-leaning media outlets like NY Post, Fox News, and Daily Wire, so I thought Wikipedia would be considered a bit more neutral.)
thanks for providing those sources, but I still think it's important to acknowledge that the claims you made are heavily disputed
what you stated were your conclusions (which may or may not be true):
- that the dossier was paid opposition research is not disputed, what is disputed is the veracity of its contents. Nothing in the link you shared suggests it was confirmed fake. In fact, many of the claims made in the dossier have been corroborated by subsequent investigations.
- On the other hand, while the the Hunter Biden laptop (also opposition research) has been authenticated, the veracity of the claims made about it are still in question, and many media outlets declined to run the story due to a lack of supporting evidence.
- Another difference to highlight is that Christopher Steele was an experienced professional who followed standard journalistic practices to protect his sources, etc., whereas Rudy Giuliani's handling of the Hunter Biden laptop (to put it very lightly) has been criticized as unprofessional and lacking in evidence.
- I'm not saying that bias in media coverage doesn't exist, but news organizations have a responsibility to verify stories with evidence before publishing them. It's also worth noting that the burden of proof is higher for claims that are "difficult to verify, yet easy to fake" (So it's not surprising that some stories are given more attention than others depending on the strength of the evidence supporting them)
> I've experienced more divisive content from western media itself than overt anti-west stuff from RT or yandex lmao. there is enough of media in the west that is in partially/wholly owned or heavily sponsored by rus and that transmit their propaganda or divisive narratives. All under disguise of free speech. And then someone may even blame that it's western media itself with their freedom of speech. how convenient.
Yandex is also a search engine, not just the now infamous Yandex News.
Yandex search is vastly censored. See recent leaks for the list of the keywords they replace in search queries.
By "replace" do you maybe mean "alias"?
In any case, the problem is that anything else is also censored. DuckDuckGo stopped indexing RuNet altogether and Google is... Google.
It's literally rewriting search queries to avoid showing putin in negative context, when people search for "khuilo" or "bunker grandpa", "main thief" etc.
https://twitter.com/romankulish/status/1620227618435125248/p... https://meduza.io/feature/2023/01/30/yandeks-blokiroval-izob...
Does the word “alias” somehow make the process kosher?
It is not the gotcha you think it is.
Not sure I understand what you mean, what "process"?. There shouldn't be any "gotchas" unless you are naive about how public service search engines operate.
Your comment tries to dismiss the argument by using softer terms like “alias” (and whataboutism but that’s a whole nother issue).
I am telling you that the word “alias” is not some gotcha that absolves Yandex of their actions like you imply.
You are letting your imagination run a bit too wild (:
Replace, alias or add negative prompts. Multiple ways of converting one prompt to the other.
Sure, but how often do you search for "old fart" and expect to see Putin?
OTOH, their image search is way better than google's.
> for "old fart" and expect to see Putin?
Living in Ukraine, I would love for the world to never see Putin again.
OTOH, I have nothing but tremendous respect for the engineers of the original Yandex. It's hard to overestimate how much they did for the russian-speaking world. I mean, they have basically invented practical stemming for Russian, Ukrainian and other close languages.
> they have basically invented practical stemming for Russian
Living in Ukraine does not make you less factually wrong. They stood on the shoulders of Sergei Starostin and Andrey Zaliznyak. The whole field of Russian Computational Linguistics owes to these two people and their faceless students. Not just Yandex Search.
Thank you, I'm quite familiar with the two.
Yandex search (more specifically: mystem and Yandex.site) was the first practical implementation of their work.
"old fart" has never been associated with Putin, in any language. If, however, you Yandex "bald dwarf" in Russian, you will immediately arrive at the desired result :) if you are outside of Russia. Not sure what happens inside, for some reason my VPN provider doesn't have Russian servers.
Yandex sold off the news to VK (ex Mail.Ru) some time ago. Along with Zen blogging platform.
Yandex search operations control was transferred to a new company after the war with the new board headed by Aleksei Kudrin, a longtime confidant of President Vladimir Putin.
"Divisive" is a slur for dissent, so I'd avoid leaning on it too readily. That said, RT et al are a pile of state propaganda shit peppered on top with selected western dissenters to make it look like they are a legit alternative. Eating a pile of shit just to feel that peppery taste banned from PC media is not something I'd personally enjoy doing, but to each their own I guess.
Maybe in English, but you have no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes. My Eastern European in-laws are hooked on Russian propaganda/disinfo and its all delivered to them in their language or Russian and its not coming from RT.
Having said that, I always chuckle at Americans who are so suspicious of RT given that they platform people like Cornell West and Chris Hedges who are absolutely blacklisted in western media.
I have no idea what the point of this comment is, other than everything sucks. :sigh:
>Having said that, I always chuckle at Americans who are so suspicious of RT given that they platform people like Cornell West and Chris Hedges who are absolutely blacklisted in western media.
Virtually everyone with any remotely anti-war view is completely blacklisted from corporate Western media, which is basically the propaganda arm of the DC blob. This is not an endorsement of RT or non-Western media (which is riddled with their own biases), simply a statement of objective fact. The purpose is always the same, to form a consensus view that if you are not gung ho for attacking (insert current foreign bad guy here), then you are either secretly sympathetic to (current foreign bad guy) or somehow a disloyal American. It is quite an effective propaganda strategy. If you are an older person, like myself, and against all foreign wars regardless of the rationale offered by the war machine, you were first "Pro Saddam" in the early 90s. Then you were "Pro Milosevic" a few years later. You then became "Pro Saddam" again in the early 2000s before becoming "Pro Gaddafi" and "Pro Assad" a decade later. You are now "Pro Putin". Because you cannot simply be "anti-war" - it is a position that the people in power simply cannot afford to let become legitimate, as it obstructs the primary of agenda of the DC war machine.
I've been like you good part of my life. Until very recently, when it hit people close to me. Fsck pootin, he's getting more and more insane. he won't stop till he's punched into his face such that his neck is broken.
> and its all delivered to them in their language or Russian and its not coming from RT.
Yep, RT is aimed primarily at the "traditional" West (ie the US and Western Europe). Russia has other propaganda organs aimed more squarely at the former Eastern Bloc.
> rus disinformation
Specifically Russian disinformation. 'Rus' is a much more neutral term which refers to the shared heritage of the Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian people.
And a few not widely recognized nations squeezed between those.
Oh no, a country we’re at war with produces content advancing their viewpoint and fomenting divisions!
The horror!
I know US media, like Voice of America, would never do something like that.
/s — the pearl clutching about things the US does because Russians is bigotry; the world isn’t a better place due to hating a certain ethnicity
Whataboutism is not a great look on anyone.
> Whataboutism
Literally "don't dismiss my non-relevant hypocrisy".
Cheap rhetorical tricks aren't really a great look either.
The entirety of the comment is saying:
A. It’s ok because war
B. Voice of America does it so it’s ok
That is, quite plainly, whataboutism. There is no substance in the comment beyond “others do it too so it’s ok for Russians to as well and if you think otherwise, well look at these others”
I know it’s hard for you to see whataboutism when your comeback to Yandex being censored was “In any case, the problem is that anything else is also censored.” but try harder.
Taxonomy is the lowest form of thought.
Either it's an outrage for MSFT to do business with warmongering countries, or it isn't. Saying we only care about Russian aggressions while ignoring our own is just jingoism.
It’s not even remotely as black and white as you make it seem, and that still doesn’t excuse whataboutism. “Warmongering” after all is an extremely objective description that I’m sure people would not disagree on the definition of at all /s.
If anything, both should be individually evaluated. But blankly dismissing one as “it’s ok Voice of America does it too” is adding nothing to the discussion but shitty logical fallacies.
I read his post as, "Mainstream news outlets within countries tend to be biased towards the interests of that country." I think that's a more good faith interpretation, and leads to a sort of water is wet type observation. That said I do think he more or less self-hijacked his own post by specifically naming Voice of America which is practically begging for your claims.
exactly. "whataboutism" is nothing more than "how dare you not let me force you to talk about/deride what -I- want to talk about/deride, and on top of it, you do it by pointing out what a blatant hypocrite I am in my rant!". The cheapest of cheap comebacks.