The only problem is I seem to hit CAPTCHA challenges very frequently.

A lot of their products are very solid. We have, at home, Yandex Music which is way cheaper than Spotify (and is quite different) and Alice, which is their Alexa equivalent. If you speak Russian, its quite good :)

In general, while I was visiting Russia last year and the year before, Yandex Taxi (like Uber) impressed me quite a lot, too.

And they have the best time series db today ClickHouse!

Russian engineering is next level. Just look at Telegram. The thing works flawlessly with billions of messages everyday and Slack struggles with some basic chat.

Does that put you on any lists?

(Local ISP seems to know a lot of what folks look at even when using https and an encrypted bittorrent client.)

if you live in a country where ISP or government puts you on a list for visiting a russian search engine, consider switching countries.

Easier said than done.

Yandex image search/visual search is also pretty good.