Sounds like we non-euopeans should stop supporting any European countries/businesses that do business with Russia

I don't know much about Russia and it's economics. Does giving money to Yandex really fund the war? If so, how much? I'm assuming they are a private company that pays some taxes to the Russian government and some of that tax money goes towards the war, but like I said, I really don't know

If you went into your neighbor's house and killed some people there, you would be caught, put to trial, and sentenced.

If a country goes into a neighboring country and starts killing people there, the natural reaction from a civilized planet would be to, at the very least, ostracize the aggressor. It should never pay to invade other countries. Invading other countries should be an obvious path to a total destruction of domestic economy and prospects for the future.

In other words, it doesn't matter if your money paid to Yandex goes directly towards bombs and drones (it actually does, if you look at the ownership structure). What matters Russian economy as a whole.

I'm not at all a supporter of Putin and his wars. A question for you though: does DDG show ads for any evil companies? Where does DDG get it's search results?

Ads can be switched off and you can also pay for the sub I believe.

Afaik DDG sources from bing and their own indexing.

Reading down the page, I didn't realize they had apps for AI and news and stuff. Pretty cool! It feels so much better to be using a service that is NOT supported by ads

If you'd like to skip all those garbage results but not deal with an AI then kagi is great. Also, they don't track you and sell your data like AI companies surely do (or will do soon)

They use several search engines, and they clean up and customize the results according to your preferences

They have a $5/month plan now, if that makes a difference to you

A few months ago I stopped paying for kagi and went back to DDG. I started noticing all the top results were AI generated, so I just went back to Kagi yesterday and it is a huge breath of fresh air. So much better!

I did something similar, when the Kagi Translate changes were announced earlier in the year. I tried a local hosted AI assistant (via openrouter) along with DDG/Brave.

80% of the time the search results were perfectly fine, but that small amount of time would royally annoy me and my breaking point was this: https://i.redd.it/r4q6y3vl5vdh1.png

So I went back to Kagi and appreciate it a little more (they've also rolled back on Translate to some degree).

I pay for kagi, but hardly ever use search any more.

Come to think of it, one of my boxes is not logged into kagi, and is mostly ai nonsense.

I guess I’ll keep paying them. :-)

"Top results" was the complaint, this hides AI coming from Duck but not from Duck's results.

Remember when ChatGPT first came out and the coolest thing you could do with it was ask it to say something in pirate speak, or in the style of Tolkein, or Obama, or whatever? Maybe that should still be a thing ;)

Add it to your system or developer prompt, and it still can be.

Given the amount of angst being expressed in this thread about particular LLM-isms, I wonder why people don't simply prompt against the traits they hate. Yes, it will reduce output quality very slightly in some circumstances, but if it really gets your goat like this, surely it's worth it.