It was also very good during the pandemic. Google results at the time were extremely biased towards Western government narratives. Some mainstream articles which took a skeptical view on lockdowns and the virus orgin seemingly would not show regardless of how you tried to search them on Google.

Yandax on the other hand tended to be more neutral.

And yet, I somehow seem to be aware that 1337x.to exists without ever having used Yandex to find it...

I have no doubt that Russia is a free for all of finding pirated stuff online, since what US copyright holder is going to bother to even attempt to sue people in russia for something like hosting a website with direct download epub files of popular books?