Yandex

Ecosia rolls out own search index results in Germany

Ecosia has begun rolling out search results in Germany that come from its own search index, aiming to reduce dependence on Google and other large providers. The company uses the European Search Perspective (EUSP) index—built with Qwant and used by Lilo—and says it already serves a majority of queries through the index in France since 2025. CEO Christian Kroll announced the German rollout on LinkedIn and indicated Ecosia could serve a large portion of German queries from the index by year-end. The move is framed alongside recent EU action against Google under the Digital Markets Act and the emergence of the Staan search API as part of a broader European search infrastructure.

Reflection Signs $1B Compute Deal with Nebius

Reflection AI, a U.S. startup building open AI models, has agreed a $1 billion compute deal with European AI infrastructure company Nebius. Nebius — formerly the international arm of Yandex — will give Reflection access to Nvidia’s latest chips. The deal follows a recent agreement giving Reflection access to SpaceX compute and comes as firms race to secure large-scale compute for training and deploying advanced models. Reflection, founded in 2024 by two former Google DeepMind researchers, is valued at $8 billion and has raised about $2.6 billion from investors including Nvidia, Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed. Nebius recently received a $2 billion investment from Nvidia and has signed multi-year infrastructure agreements with Meta and Microsoft worth tens of billions.

Cutting QA Reduced Production Incidents — Case Study

A B2B analytics company that ships features 5–6 times daily removed its two-person QA team at the end of Q3 2025 and replaced classic UI-focused testing with a developer-owned quality process plus a new Data Quality team. Backend developers absorbed frontend checks via a Jira "Backend-test" status and took responsibility for verifying numbers on-screen against their outputs, while the Data Quality team built continuous input-monitoring and anomaly dashboards for the data lake. The company runs a ClickHouse-backed data lake (~100TB compressed) with ETL services and stores raw HTML on S3. Comparing two matched release cycles, created production incidents fell from 28→19 in release quarters and 51→26 in the post-release quarters after QA was cut, though the author notes sample size and concurrent Data Quality work limit causal attribution.