[inikulin]

I'm completely against current behavior of the russian government and I use Google on daily basis. However, I can't see how Yandex should be considered to be the company "that practice large-scale censorship, they are instruments of repressive regimes"? This is a great company, which contributes both to open source and science (numerous collaborations with CERN, etc.). And it really tries to fight for the web freedom here in Russia, which involves a huge risk for their business. Speaking of censorship: I'm often see message regarding DMCA in Google search results, nearly never seen them in Yandex.

[Grue3]

Because Yandex is based in Russia, it has no alternative but to share its data with the government. If you value your privacy, avoid using any Russian-based search engines or social networks if you live in Russia.

[inikulin]

> If you value your privacy, avoid using any Russian-based search engines or social networks if you live in Russia

Pushing this forward, if you so much value your privacy you should not use any service which has official representatives (official company behind it), because in many countries they should provide user data on goverment requests (e.g. http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/userdatarequests/RU...). This is a disturbing fact, but this is how modern society works. You should throw out the window all your electronic devices and move somethere to the North Pole to protect your privacy (and I can't guarantee that satellite will not watching you). "Privacy" nowadays is just a huge illusion which is an euphemism for the statement: "Somehow, you can be sure they will not come for you for what you doing. For now...".

[yellowapple]

Did you mean Yandex? Yahoo! is based in California.