My main reservation in signing up for Kagi has been their revenue sharing agreement with Yandex. In addition to gradually building their own index and search, Kagi also uses a number of existing search backends, including Bing, Google, and Yandex. And they pay these companies for access, so a portion of your fee is supporting Yandex. I don't want them to censor or exclude Russian content but I don't want to be financially supporting a Russian company either, especially one that has ties to the government.
A caveat to this is that at the time the controversy about Kagi supporting Yandex broke out there were actually two Yandexes. The founder of Yandex, Arkady Volozh, left Russia in 2014 when they invaded Crimea, and had started working on making Yandex NV, a Dutch Holding company, more independent of Russia. This accelerated after Russia invaded Ukraine and by July 2024 he had relocated all Russian employees that wished to leave the country, sold off all Russian assets, severed ties with Russia and Yandex LLC, and renamed the remaining company the Nebius Group. The complaints about Kagi supporting Yandex occurred between these two events and it was never clear whether their deal was with Yandex NV or Yandex LLC, and whether Kagi continues to have a revenue sharing deal with Yandex LLC, or if it is now with Nebius. Instead they scrubbed most of the information about what backends they use from their website.
