It's literally rewriting search queries to avoid showing putin in negative context, when people search for "khuilo" or "bunker grandpa", "main thief" etc.

https://twitter.com/romankulish/status/1620227618435125248/p... https://meduza.io/feature/2023/01/30/yandeks-blokiroval-izob...

Does the word “alias” somehow make the process kosher?

It is not the gotcha you think it is.

Replace, alias or add negative prompts. Multiple ways of converting one prompt to the other.

> for "old fart" and expect to see Putin?

Living in Ukraine, I would love for the world to never see Putin again.

OTOH, I have nothing but tremendous respect for the engineers of the original Yandex. It's hard to overestimate how much they did for the russian-speaking world. I mean, they have basically invented practical stemming for Russian, Ukrainian and other close languages.

"old fart" has never been associated with Putin, in any language. If, however, you Yandex "bald dwarf" in Russian, you will immediately arrive at the desired result :) if you are outside of Russia. Not sure what happens inside, for some reason my VPN provider doesn't have Russian servers.