> 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.