Googling with the KGB

OK, it's not google (work with me here) and it's no longer the KGB (it's the FSB, work with me here), but I've shifted to the Russian search engine Yandex.  I like it quite a bit, and (perhaps unexpectedly) think that it's more secure than Google.  First, the highlights:

1. Russia has a bunch of excellent computer scientists, and Yandex seems to have picked up a bunch of them.  The Russians always excelled at algorithms (I'd go so far as to say that their mathematics training beats ours handily), and search is a game of algorithms.  I'm told that the Russian language is more difficult for computers to deal with than English (it is an inflected language, unlike ours), and so the Yandex algorithms originally developed for Russian really shine when aimed at English sites.

2. It gives me very good results - for most things I've been looking for, better than Google.  Google's blogsearch has become a joke, which is perhaps a testament to Google's internal lack of focus.  I find that bloggy related searches are much more productive on Yandex.

For example, I had no idea at all that I'd been linked to by Democratic Party News.  Google simply missed this, but Yandex sees all. And by "all" I mean a metric s**t ton more.  If you blog and want to see who's linking to you, take Yandex for a test drive.

And now we come to what brought me to Yandex in the first place: Google is evil.  We all know it.  Furthermore, Google seems to be playing footsie with the US Government Intelligence Agencies:

One privacy advantage Yandex has which Google never will: Yandex does not do business with American intelligence agencies.  I do not like the fact that Google has become an arm of US intelligence agencies. It is to their credit that Google discloses their relationship with the US government (most of Silicon Valley is in bed with the spooks, but they don’t talk about  it). It is the surveillance  state that I abhor. Yandex may very well be doing the same thing with the Russian government, but the FSB is a much smaller threat to American civil rights than our own spooks. While I see no immanent dangers from the all-seeing eye, and I am far from paranoid, the US is going through a weird time right now, and history is a dark and bloody subject. Do I really want the future government  to know what websearches I was doing in 2010? No, thanks,  tovarich.

I recall (from my days at Three Letter Intelligence Agency) the saying there are friendly foreign governments, but there are no friendly foreign Intelligence Agencies.  Looking at the history of the last 15 years - from the Clipper chip to Carnivore to the strange privacy twilight that has descended after 9/11, I would tend to remove the ford "foreign" from that statement.

And once you do that, the question becomes stark: who do I think is more interested in the spoutings and bloggy poo flingings of your humble host: the Russian FSB or the FBI/CIA/NSA/it's-a-great-place-to-start?

To ask the question is to answer it, так?

And so fair thee well, Google.  I don't trust your rankings, and I think that the meat and potatoes of your business - search - is increasingly missing stuff I think is important.  And I simply don't trust you, or our Three Letter Intelligence Agencies.  I so don't trust you that I seem to be more comfortable with the FSB monitoring my search activity instead.