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Russia’s biggest search engine secretly put blocks in its code to stop images of Vladimir Putin showing up in the results of potentially embarrassing searches, according to a report, with Nazi iconography also allegedly scrubbed out of the results of queries for the “Z” symbol signifying support for the war in Ukraine.
Last week, fragments of the source code for Yandex—sometimes likened to “Russia’s Google”—were leaked online. Experts have been poring over the code ever since to see what can be gleaned about how the site works, with some eyebrow-raising results.
According to independent Russian news site Meduza, Yandex automatically altered users’ search queries to stop images of President Vladimir Putin from showing up when the user searched for individual words including “bald” and “fucker.”