[gurkendoktor]

A neutral web browser is not one that only lets me access politically neutral websites (all five of them), but one that doesn't care what I look at.

In fact, the few times that I've used Yandex were because it is not politically neutral. I was curious whether the results for some queries look different when they're not being filtered through the lens of the American empire. That use case should make Yandex more relevant these days, not less.

(Although, to be honest, the search results were quite boring and normal.)

[ogurechny]

It's the Russian-language news service that was crippled. First, they were forced to only use officially licensed media sources, then they were forced to add lots of junk “newspapers” chain-posting the propaganda, and so on, and so on. So the headlines on top of the search page have been total crap for years.

The search results are mostly affected by the usual blacklists: DMCA notices for pirate sites, right-to-be-forgotten requests, government blocked pages (supposedly based on client location). Note that this list is not complete. For example, western services silently ban sites presumably “used to share child porn, based on informed opinion” of this or that group that might not even have a legal right to force anyone to do anything. How informed is that opinion? If you look at what Russian censorship agency does in the same regard, you can only call them utterly mad. You can be sure it's not the only case when someone has a backdoor that lets them hide stuff “for the public good”. Remember those stories about third world grunts cleaning Facebook from “NSFW content”, and making first world users feel comfy there? The results of their work are probably shared between corporations, too, and applied in some way.