There is nothing about collaborating with Russian government in the post. They merely make use of a Russian-based search engine to provide better search results. I won't argue if this is good or bad, but from your statement it sounds like they collect all the users' data and sell it directly to Federal Security Service.

That's as shallow as "<anything Russian> is Russian government". Russian government certainly established strong leverage over Yandex (and every other major business for that matter), but they don't exactly own the company.

Such blanket statements really don't bring anything to the table.

PS: I think you might be confusing Yandex with VK. VK are known to be loyal to government and provide users' data to law enforcement at a whim, without proper procedures.

Ok, so they say Yandex queries are 2% of their costs. Kagi currently has 57341 paying members. Even if you assume that every single user has a $25/month Ultimate membership and that 100% of that money goes towards search API (which is both obviously not the case), you'll get that Kagi pays about $29000/month to Yandex. According to World Bank, the corporate tax burden in Russia is about 46% of profit, so if you assume all of this money as profit, Kagi pays $13000/month to the Russian government. In reality, Kagi spends MUCH less than $25/user on search API costs, and Yandex doesn't claim all of that money as profit, so the real figure is closer to $1000-5000, maybe even less. And most of that money goes to local governments or pension funds anyway. So yeah, Kagi may pay likeabout 1-2 cents a month from each user's subscription to the Russian government in exchange to massively improving the quality of their service. That's not nearly enough to call it "proudly collaborating with the Russian government", and I can guarantee you that MUCH more of your money goes to Russia every month in other ways. In fact, if you live in Europe, you probably pay more to Russia in your own taxes.