DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused search engine has delisted the popular pirate sites from its search results, without any notice or force from external sources.
This removal is not limited to a certain region, but everywhere. Alongside the major pirate sites, the status referring websites that only mention the links to concerned pirate sites are also unavailable. Further, the recently disputed YouTube-dl too is taken down.
DuckDuckGo Poaches on Pirate Sites
DuckDuckGo is already being praised for its privacy-focused policies in browsing and is now getting hard on pirate sites to be more good. Since Saturday, any searches made in DuckDuckGo regarding the pirate sites results in nothing. And this isn’t limited to a particular area, but everywhere!
The search engine has simply delisted all the URLs belonging to popular pirate sites like The Pirate Bay, 1337x.to, NYAA.se, Fmovies.to, Lookmovie.io, and 123moviesfree.net. Further, a search made for RarBG.to and Fitgirl shows only one result, instead of the thousands we see on other search engines now.
Well, this delisting isn’t limited to pirate sites, but also to the indexing sites which merely show the status of pirates sites’ activity. Also, live streaming portals like Flixtor and Primewire too are gone. Popular stream-rippers like 2conv.com, Flvto bid, etc are too removed.
While we aren’t wondering about their removal due to their nature, a software tool that recently contested against unfair takedown and won is also taken down. We’re talking about YouTube-dl, a popular ripping site that’s open-source software and tips only non-DRM content is unavailable in DuckDuckGo results.
Source code for YouTube-dl was previously removed by GitHub after a complaint from RIAA but later reinstated by GitHub after finding reasonable factors to restore. The specific reason for DuckDuckGo’s wide and sudden crackdown on pirate sites isn’t known as of now.
