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.

> Also DuckDuckGo sources from far more than just Bing and it does have its own crawler as well.

Do you have a source for this? I'd be interested in reading the technicals of merging search results from multiple sources.

They do use their crawler to source some "smart" results, but the bulk of ordinary results seems to be from Bing.

Yep, DDG admists this (blog post from a few weeks back). When DDG first started, most of their results came from Yandex IIRC.

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.

Your data is useless, no matter where it is. Data on the collective of American citizens, however, is not.

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.

Yet, my ads become more valuable when they have data that I’m interested in a specific subject. Absent if that data, the ads are worth less.

Isn’t Yandex completely Russian? I usually get Yandex with my malware as well.

.ru is but .com the other is european based.

I wouldn’t trust it even if it’s only partially Russian. If they offer “private” search services, they must also have a way to monetise it.

For most things you can skip Yandex and go directly to the rutracker which would be the top result for most things anyway.

Yandex is great for politically sensitive content too. Yandex tends to give less manipulated results when compared to Western search-engines which are often censored and politically biased.

Yandex is also biased (in a different manner).

Can you give some examples of politically sensitive content that is manipulated or censored on western search engines compared to Russian?

Do any search for any US political content on Google. I (in Kansas City) get almost all Left-leaning to hard Left news sites as the first 10 results, while pre-Trump results I'd almost always get 2-3 lean/far-Right results in top 10.

Compare vs AllSides https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news

is it possible that yandex is manipulated and it just fits your world view better?

Something I used Yandex for was research during the pandemic. Not sure if it's the same today but at one point it was humorously hard to find anything that suggested the COVID-19 vaccines were anything but 100% safe and effective on Google. This is especially true if it's video content because video sites which host vaccine sceptical content are heavily down ranked by Google - sites like Bitchute and Odysee. And obviously YouTube which ranks well in Google wasn't allowing that content at all - not sure if that's still the same today.

On politically sensitive content here's an example I've shown before of how a search for "Trump" might differ between Google and Yandex, https://imgur.com/oPXP0wh If searching for controversial figures or organisations you'll find Google tends to return news articles from left-wing media outlets where as Yandex tends to just return links associated to the individual / organisation. You can see this difference for yourself if you search for individuals like "Alex Jones".

Other notable examples would be extremely controversial content that Google / YouTube hides from results or removes completely. So for example if you want to find various alt-right / extremist content you basically need to use Yandex at this point. I'd rather not share specific examples of this, but as someone who's interested in online extremism if you want to view source materials you'll quickly find you need to use alternative search engines like Yandex to find this. There are also examples I'd consider extremist-adjacent like discussions around race and IQ or immigration policy which tends to be fairly one sided in Google. You will find some diversity of opinion but because Google downranks a lot of the more controversial sites the conversation is certainly biased towards what's political acceptable. I'm not necessarily criticising Google for this by the way, I'm just saying it's something that Google does and you should be aware of if you're ever searching for things considered politically incorrect.

I'm also aware of examples where Google searches tend to be more "diversified". This isn't something I've noticed or am that concerned with personally, but I'm aware of people who feel Google biases search results for things like "white families" to show more interracial families while Yandex doesn't. And I think there are examples where you can search for things like "famous scientists" and get more women scientists in the results than you might expect. From what I've seen I think this can be explained in good faith and isn't necessarily evidence of Google tampering with the results, but I've seen people (mostly in alt-right circles) share cherry-picked examples (in my opinion anyway) of stuff like this.

Please stop, you are letting the secret out. If too many people know yandex will start filtering the results.

This is an awesome pro tip. The results reminds me of the early 2010 google results.

Just google and use site:vk.ru

That yields no results and the hint „Some results may have been removed under data protection law in Europe.“ for me.

try site:vk.com

Yes I did.