Yandex is a pretty good search engine. Yandex is essentially what people think DuckDuckGo is, on the other hand DuckDuckGo is essentially is just Bing.
My impression was most use DuckDuckGo for privacy reasons so it's a bit surprising to read Yandex is supposed to be what people think DuckDuckGo is. Also DuckDuckGo sources from far more than just Bing and it does have its own crawler as well.
My understanding of Yandex was that it's just another user-information-is-primary-income search provider this time HQ'd in Russia, neither of which exactly appealing to the typical DDG crowd.
Though I'd throw Kagi out to anyone who puts a lot of weight on such things as being a more pure example than either.
When I was looking into it I only found a few high level things like https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so.... Nothing on how the sausage is made unfortunately. Same for Kagi which takes a similar layered approach (though anecdotally it seemed a bit more spread across backend sources).
>My understanding of Yandex was that it's just another user-information-is-primary-income search provider this time HQ'd in Russia, neither of which exactly appealing to the typical DDG crowd.
A Russian company having my data given the current state of relations between it and my government is less worrisome than Google having the same.
This response, though frequently used, is wrong. If my data is useless they wouldn’t collect it. They use this data to target ads specifically for me, increasing those ads value. So yes, individuals data is worth something.
That's not how ad targeting works. Your data is used in aggregate to target ads to your purported demographic, and that designation is usually obtained on-the-fly via your recent page visits. Storing your individual interests isn't worth the money it costs.
That said, this has nothing to do with ads. It's a matter of foreign intelligence.
