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[–] 28 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Russian Yandex

Exceptionally good at finding torrent sites and other piracy outlets, because they aren't working hand-in-glove with American broadcasters to censor and shadowban these links. Google, Bing, DDG, and the other American mainline search sites all focus on feeding end-users into a discrete set of Web2 mega-site sponsors. Yandex uses the older web crawlers and indexing tools, so it gives more honest (abet fuzzier and less reliable) results. And since nobody really gives a shit about Yandex, the efforts to game its algorithm have been comparatively minimal.

Yandex also has the benefit of being relatively English-friendly, while other popular non-English search sites like Baidu, Qwant, and Naver don't cater too quite so freely.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    And they have really good products - the Navigator is great, and Yandex Music was better than Spotify (until the war started and a lot of labels/artists disappeared).
    I'm not using their products now as I don't want to feed the government, but they do(did?) some great stuff.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    Who still uses search engines to find torrent, though?

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    It's been common ever since magnet links were created, since you can post a magnet link anywhere (even in a plain text file) rather than having to upload a .torrent file somewhere like in the old days.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago*

    Sites periodically get taken down or rendered less than useful. Especially for live streaming.

    Yandex was invaluable when I was looking for Olympics streams, for instance. Also really depends on which communities are hosting to which torrent sites. I found nyaa.si off Yandex, because I couldn't find the anime I was looking for on 1337x.to.

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