In any case, the problem is that anything else is also censored. DuckDuckGo stopped indexing RuNet altogether and Google is... Google.
https://twitter.com/romankulish/status/1620227618435125248/p... https://meduza.io/feature/2023/01/30/yandeks-blokiroval-izob...
It is not the gotcha you think it is.
I am telling you that the word “alias” is not some gotcha that absolves Yandex of their actions like you imply.
OTOH, their image search is way better than google's.
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.
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.
Yandex search (more specifically: mystem and Yandex.site) was the first practical implementation of their work.