Yandex is incredible for things that Google and Bing serves up useless spam for.
If you search “watch $MOVIE free” on google you’re going to get netflix, Hulu, prime, Disney etc as the first results regardless of whether those sites even have it in their library. The remaining links are SEO spam that also don’t have it but pretend they do, because the sites that actually do have all been struck or filtered.
Yandex on the other hand… the first result is generally exactly what you wanted in 720 or 1080 with no BS.
I do miss when google had a little footer that said “click here to view URLs that were removed due to copyright takedown requests”.
Edit: And I do pay for all of those streaming services and more, but in Canada if a franchise has 5 movies it’s not unheard of to have #1 on Netflix, #2 on Paramount, #3 on no service available here, and #4 and #5 on Disney or Crave. It’s the same with seasons of TV series: exhausting.
For me, searching "Watch Oppenheimer Free" on Google returns mostly malware and fake media-purchase websites (that will probably try to steal my credit card), mixed with SEO spam about "how and why it's not available on Netflix or Hulu... yet".
To me that's significantly worse than showing no results.
Edit: this is the same domain that hosts documents on the latest laws for cybersecurity (Radio Equipment Directive, Cyber Resilience Act, ...). And the same body that airs strong opinions on client side scanning. The same org that wants to be in charge of a EU wide database of vulnerabilities so it can tell you if your patch management process is too slow. ENISA were informed about these problems over 8 months ago. Meanwhile they are publicly ridiculed on social media for not fixing it.
For people who didn't get the joke: these are indeed "hosted" by things like Google Docs, Scribd... but also by EU government websites.
But not willingly!
And yep, the bulk of Google results for me are those. Half those, half stupid blogspam, half fake-legitimate websites claiming to be legit sellers of media.
I've never seen this domain pop up in my searches. Most of the links on Google end up at a 404, though.
Who's benefiting from these weird PDF uploads? Is it the copyright industry trying to make it impossible to pirate their movies? The PDFs don't even contain a link to the ad fraud site that's supposedly generating these.
If they were using it to educate people about the consequences of piracy, I could understand why they would host that, but that's not the case here. What is the purpose of this?
Not sure if unpatched arbitrary file-upload vulnerabilities that rexult in blogspam and hosted malware, or doctored documents do serve any purpose? But maybe I'm just not thinking adversarial enough :-/
How else will digital sinners learn only to trust corporate streaming services if they are not shown that the alternatives are OBVIOUS ROADS TO DAMNATION?
AI generated websites have ruined "when does X come out". It wouldn't be as big a problem if studios could just announce these things on their website, but instead you need to get this information from interviews and news articles which get overwhelmed by AI trash in most search engines.
And the companies almost don’t want you to know - they’d rather you rent/buy the video online for $20 instead of waiting a period of time to rent it cheaper.
That's what I just searched and was able to watch Oppenheimer. The point isn't that it's crummy, the point is that Google or Bing are not answering your query or are answering with junk.
And Yandex reverse image search isn't neutered for copyright reasons either.
It almost seems like Google of yesteryear, but with far more Russian language results.
Google and Bing both changed their emphasis to finding things within an image rather than trying to find similar images. But one is not a substitute for the other.
Google Lens and whatever Bing calls their equivalent almost never find what I'm looking for. They barely function as a reverse image search anymore, and that's a real shame.
"In response to a legal request submitted to Google, we have removed 3 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read more about the request at LumenDatabase.org.
In response to a complaint that we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at LumenDatabase.org."
If you go to that service they'll require an email but you can use a discardable one and still be anonymous to get the original blocked URLs.
I actually still use this for torrent searches sometimes, it just takes a few more clicks.
Yandex Translate is also much better for many languages, especially for eastern ones. And viewing words and their synonyms individually is a huge godsend if you are looking at slang.
I just tried out Yandex Translate on a few words. My only criticism is I find the audio playback too fast. Google Translate plays the audio at a slower rate which I find easier for learning the pronunciation of foreign words.
Yandex.ru seems to be the real deal, uncensored internet (except anything not politically compliant with russia) while yandex.com doesn’t give me that useful results for the movie query. Google.com feels so censored and crippled now.
I know this is old news by now, but Google really is becoming useless. I wonder, are they even aware internally that this is happening or are they so lost in their "Google is awesome" bubble that they have no chance of fixing it in time?
I hadn't even considered using Yandex. Tried switching from Google to Bing this year but results are not much better - half of Google's results are either ads or irrelevant "safe" results.
People spill a lot of characters on here about political censorship while ignoring that the existing Internet "speech" control infrastructure overwhelmingly deals in (a) copyright infringement and (b) CSAM. Those get slapped down everywhere by almost everybody.
Sure? I would assume many of the world's countries do not care about copyright infringements on the internet.
Also much of the existing speech control infrastructure is used to censor what people can see or say outside of copyright and CSAM (see China, Iran, Myanmar, UAE, Belarus, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Syria, Thailand, Turkey, Uzbekistan, ...)
searx is a search engine aggregator. searx.be is in instance of it and as i can see the only default general search engine which is on on this instance is google.
I'm not an american, I live in a small EU country.
I've seen wikileaks, and I know what US did and can assume that they did a lot more and worse after that... and the NSA catalog was a fun thing to read too.
And on the other hand, we have speculations ("not too far fetched") about russians doing bad stuff on a massively-used search engine, in english, about malware that will be detected, dissected and analyzed in a matter of minutes by pretty much every government agency of every nato country...
I'll take my chances. And also, i'm pretty sure UK wouldnt extradite a russian journalist if they posted about yandex doing bad stuff.
Amen. I've never understood why people fear speculated Chinese and Russian spying, while they never seem to recall the US spying that is well documented and confirmed.
Seriously. This is extremely well documented behavior of various regimes all over the world and you will not be able to produce even one example of America doing it.
The reason that the US and RU/CCP aren’t treated the same is because they do not behave the same.
Ahh the good odl “my version” of democracy. We go through this with every single thread about Singapore.
Fun variants to play:
- Show me one instance of my country performing extrajudicial killings by drone that take out an entire unaligned wedding party (Russian? American? Afghan wedding party probably doesn’t see the difference)
- Show me instance where “my country”’s law enforcement kills random people in their bed because they were in the wrong house
- Frequently chokes people to death because, uh, definitely their skin color, religion, sexual orientation? (Plenty of candidates here)
- At least my country doesn’t force down planes in contravention of international law because there’s someone on board we don’t like (Belarus? Any takers for more?)
- Randomly grabs people off the street and tortures them in black sites around eastern europe. (This is a fun one, so many competitors)
- Or “definitely doesn’t punish family” as long as you don’t count separating children from their parents in internment camps and losing them (Fun family game of “Things that happen along which border for 20$ ? Ukraine or Mexico?”).
I get it, I get it, it’s less bad than outright torture killing, so one can still feel morally superior to the Nazis or Russians. Unless one remembers the picture from the extraordinary rendition blacksites.
Seriously. It’s extremely well documented behavior of “regimes” all over the world, but …
One can absolutely be proud of their country for whatever reason of their choosing, not much wrong with that, but when you’re forced to narrowly cherry-pick definitions to arrive at “phew, still less bad”, you’re pretty deep down the rationalizing game already and may want to ask yourself what your redline is. Because the Reich set a pretty damn high bar in the last century when it comes to comparative rationalization.
The point here isn’t to make you feel bad about your country, you can do very little about these things, whether you are an individual Russian or American - I think we all should rather hang our heads in shame about where we managed to get the world to slip, forgetting the hard learned history lessons that play these inane games of “if you position the lens exactly this way, how dare you imply my country is as bad as yours”.
Ah the good ol’ “I don’t have a response so I’m going to just throw mud into the conversational waters.” This has nothing to do with “is my country better than yours.” Someone asked a specific question about a specific dimension of comparison and I gave a specific example as to why they’re treated differently. It’s clear as day.
> I think we all should rather hang our heads in shame about where we managed to get the world to slip, forgetting the hard learned history lessons
If you think the world has “slipped” to some local minima exemplified by modern US behavior, you haven’t been paying attention to history at all.
Reducing collateral damage in military operations is a great reason for more US spying, not less.
It’s actually pretty remarkable that we even think about a single individual dying by accident these days. Great argument for how carefully the US conducts warfare.
The US was at war with a non-state actor who committed an act of war against its civilians. State-to-state warfare is not the only form that has ever existed.
I would not consider USA LEO illegally detaining or using excessive force comparable to the Kremlin ordering the arrest of a dissident's family members. One is an individual acting on ignorance, racism, or poor training while the other is a concerted regime effort to maintain control by scaring potential dissidents. The message being "even if you escape punishment we'll go after your family".
Children separated from parents at the border may disagree with your notion of non family punishment.
“My country is less bad than your country” is a fun game, but at some point it does require a very large amount of cognitive dissonance to stay ahead of the game. Especially when the country is standing with one foot in a perpetual white supremacist coup
Children who cross the border illegally are also breaking the law. A law that every country on the planet has. The punitive familial separation was absolutely atrocious and I hope people go to prison for it, but it’s nowhere close to “my son said something mean about POTUS on the internet, now I’m being detained.”
So you’re suggesting that you’re concerned about the US arresting and/or drone striking you in the EU?
In EU’s case, the reason you should view US spying differently from RU/CCP spying is that US spying just saved your continent from being rolled by Russia, while RU spying/influence is what rendered EU leadership blind to the largest military operation since WW2 on their doorstep.
Maybe not bomb, but if I did something high profile enough, I'd be afraid they'd extradite me to USA, even if it's illegal. I'm pretty sure they wouldn't extradite me to russia.
And yes, russia definitely attacked EU and google+nsa spying on my phone definitely stopped them, sure.
Maybe nato shouldn't build so many bases and put so much american weapons all around russia (and china). The world would be a much nicer and peaceful place if US kept their army at home.... just the list of attacked countries is huge.
You mean US bombs flying over my head not that long ago to bomb a country 4 hours away with a car, while still acting as if nato is a purely defensive organization? Yeah... thank you, but no. I'd be much happier if US just packed their stuff and went back home, and maybe be able to afford some healthcare for all the people at home... and education... and maybe deal with the homeless problem, instead of wasting all that money for wars.
> Show me one instance America detaining someone for a family member’s political dissidence?
Nah we're not playing your game of restricting this to family members for political speech.
Your original point was to address
> Amen. I've never understood why people fear speculated Chinese and Russian spying, while they never seem to recall the US spying that is well documented and confirmed.
> In some cases, family members – including young
children – of “ghost detainees” have been detained themselves, and
held in CIA secret sites, including 9 and 7 year old boys.
"Nah we're not playing your game of [responding to the point you actually made]"
The question is why US spying is treated differently than Chinese and Russian. The answer is that China and Russia behave dramatically differently than the US does. I never made any claim as to the US being some flawless benevolent entity, but I made a clear argument (that you've not refuted) as to why most of the global community views them differently.
> The answer is that China and Russia behave dramatically differently than the US does.
yes. they are open about what they do whereas we do it covertly
> why most of the global community views them differently.
citation needed
"most of the global community"
you mean the west, which is not even a majority of the global community.
but even if it was a majority, again, because we do it covertly, we hide it and everyone only sees the good things until someone like snowden comes along and leaks our dirty laundry.
I mean, really any site I visit on the internet I assume is one mistake away from trying to exploit by computer. I don't trust the links off Google either, they are pretty apt to serve malware laden crap. Especially when you search up 'free' anything.
Google and Bing cooperate with various governments to a lesser or greater extent; we also know that the NSA subverted Google's internal networks for months or years (allegedly without their cooperation, but given the national security letter system, who knows).
Realistically anyone could be placing malware anywhere and the right defenses are an up-to-date browser and some level of common sense. But if we're going to start worrying about state actors, I think the odds of getting renditioned by the NSA/CIA are much higher than by "Russia", even if only because Russia is busy with a lot of other stuff at the moment.
> But if we're going to start worrying about state actors, I think the odds of getting renditioned by the NSA/CIA are much higher than by "Russia", even if only because Russia is busy with a lot of other stuff at the moment.
Renditions are one thing, that's bordering on conspiracy peddling, but using computers from people all over the world to do your bidding in a botnet? That's been a thing for many years now. I remember this already being a huge issue 15 years ago, with people taking cracks of popular software, adding a piece of malware to the crack, uploading the malware-laced package to torrent trackers and manipulating UL/DL stats to make people believe their package was the authentic one.
If I were in an army and tasked to deal with cyberwar efforts, the first thing I'd do was to set up a botnet and let it run in stealth mode, so that I'd have the resources for massive strikes ready at a moment's notice. Basically the cheater way to win in Plague Inc - achieve worldwide distribution, hide away and then ramp up all of a sudden to overwhelm the opponent.
There's plenty of botnets, sure, but those are all over the internet, and mostly used for mundane spam (penis enlargement, crypto, or whatever the current thing is), DDOS extortion, etc.. No reason for them to be tied to the Russian government - if anything they're a commodity that gets bought and sold on the market these days.
I wouldn't trust Yandex for anything political, but for other information it should be fine. As for malware, not downloading and running random executables is going to already be sufficient for preventing infection, and disabling JS by default will catch the rest of exploits --- especially those that try to obfuscate their presence.
Which security risks are you talking about specifically? Malware can only run if you download and execute it locally, otherwise yandex is as bad as any other site in my book. The only thing I’m relatively concerned with is tracking, but it’s much more of a risk for russian citizens rather than for non-russian.
Your comment sounds like it’s a website or some hacker who decides if you’re secure and not your browser. Which is obviously wrong and smells of fringe security ideas.
If you search “watch $MOVIE free” on google you’re going to get netflix, Hulu, prime, Disney etc as the first results regardless of whether those sites even have it in their library. The remaining links are SEO spam that also don’t have it but pretend they do, because the sites that actually do have all been struck or filtered.
Yandex on the other hand… the first result is generally exactly what you wanted in 720 or 1080 with no BS.
I do miss when google had a little footer that said “click here to view URLs that were removed due to copyright takedown requests”.
Edit: And I do pay for all of those streaming services and more, but in Canada if a franchise has 5 movies it’s not unheard of to have #1 on Netflix, #2 on Paramount, #3 on no service available here, and #4 and #5 on Disney or Crave. It’s the same with seasons of TV series: exhausting.