In a sign of how fractious this battle has become, major broadcasters recently took action against Yandex due to the existence of ‘pirate’ resources in search results. In protest, Gazprom-Media, National Media Group (NMG), and others removed their TV channels from Yandex’s ‘TV Online’ service.
According to comments obtained by Russia’s Kommersant, the media companies will only allow their content to appear again if Yandex “purges the pirated versions” from its search results.
“This is the only way we can influence them to remove pirated content,” the source said.
Say whaaaaaat? I personally don’t understand how corporate search engines are a part of our lives. But I am even more flummoxed by how removing oneself from a search engine is gonna pan out for those folks, whose entire economic game is based on eyeballs seeing ads…