https://yandex.com/search/?msid=1661717771857485-52510224241...
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.
Do you have a source for this? I'd be interested in reading the technicals of merging search results from multiple sources.
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.
That said, this has nothing to do with ads. It's a matter of foreign intelligence.
Compare vs AllSides https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news
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.