Given all the anti-Russia yammer in the Hivemind and elsewhere, I’ve enjoyed sitting back (admittedly behind a decent VPN) and using Yandex for more and more things “Interwebby.” Save for a Gmail account that I use less and less, Google, THE single most evil internet gang, is completely blocked on my computers. Yeh, I know Google says its tracking of me and suchlike is turned off, and what it reports as having on me is the next thing to zero (Google’s lying, of course), but thanks to a decent VPN and other measures (TOR!), much of what Google has on me is ancient history, and much of the rest is. . . not exactly accurate. It’s a pleasure to not have seen a Google ad for years, now, for example.
Yandex is a Russian-based, multi-national company and “is the 5th largest search engine worldwide after Google, Baidu, Bing, and Yahoo!.” (Wikipedia) I quite often use its search capabilities to good effect, and the email service it offers is slowly replacing Gmail in my daily use. Slowly. Perhaps because of my VPN use, and a few other things, ads and other obvious intrusions from Yandex just haven’t appeared on my horizon, and I have yet to discover any blatant politicizing of search results, as seemed so common with Google.
And, by avoiding Google as much as possible, I lend as little support as possible to such as this:
BANNED BY GOOGLE FOR OPPOSING INFANTICIDE
As I said in the post title, it is my considered opinion, supportable by evidence such as that which is noted at the linked article above, that Google is evil. Period. IMO, not even Me$$y$oft, Apple, and FarceBook combined approach Google’s evil. Avoid Google “services.” The (as yet) unborn will bless you, if nothing else.