It's literally rewriting search queries to avoid showing putin in negative context, when people search for "khuilo" or "bunker grandpa", "main thief" etc.
Not sure I understand what you mean, what "process"?. There shouldn't be any "gotchas" unless you are naive about how public service search engines operate.
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.
> they have basically invented practical stemming for Russian
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.
"old fart" has never been associated with Putin, in any language. If, however, you Yandex "bald dwarf" in Russian, you will immediately arrive at the desired result :) if you are outside of Russia. Not sure what happens inside, for some reason my VPN provider doesn't have Russian servers.
Yandex search operations control was transferred to a new company after the war with the new board headed by Aleksei Kudrin, a longtime confidant of President Vladimir Putin.