Elain Brown Tech 04.15.2022 22:Apr PM EDT

DuckDuckGo Now Won't Allow You To Become a Pirate — Say Goodbye to Torrents, Free Movies, YouTube-dl

DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused search engine, has permanently removed search results for several widely known pirate sites from its results pages.

Several YouTube services have also been undetected by the search engine, and the homepages of the open-source software youtube-dl and youtube-mp3 have been rendered inaccessible as well.

Delisting Pirate Sites

DuckDuckGo's shutdown of shady content now extends to digital bootleggers, as part of its ongoing fight against illegal content.

As of the moment, when searching for several widely known pirate websites, they were no longer appearing in the results of DuckDuckGo's search engine worldwide. The absence of results does not only apply to pirate sites in their own right.

As Engadget reports, DuckDuckGo will return no results when searching for widely used pirate domains such as: The Pirate Bay, 1337x.to, NYAA.se, Fmovies.to, Lookmovie.io, and 123moviesfree.net. The streaming portals Flixtor and Primewire do not appear to have any results, either.

A few well-known stream-rippers have been completely removed from the search engine results page. 2conv.com, Flvto.bid, and a number of other websites fall into this category.

However, searching for RarBG, another third-party pirate website, yields only one result, as opposed to the previous hundreds of thousands of results on DuckDuckGo.

DuckDuckGo Crackdown

DuckDuckGo, just like any search engine, also experiences copyright issues. This first became apparent when it removed several search shortcuts for 'pirate' sites. These pirate sites are also called "bangs", and have been seen as a potential copyright infringement liability.

DuckDuckBang's Tagawa stated, "We operate globally, as do bangs, and products that actively facilitate interaction with illegal content can have us and our employees face significant legal liability, and jeopardizing the entire service."

Recently, it appears that this plethora of pirate domains have now been completely deindexed from the search engine. Despite using a VPN and switching country locations, the failure to produce results is not limited to a single country. DuckDuckGo appears to have removed all URLs from its index, without any explanation.

According to TorrentFreak, another website that the search engine took down is youtube-dl, which is one of the most surprising for some users. When searching for youtube-dl, the search engine will just return no results at all.

Avid users of youtube-dl wonder the reason behind this since the website does not host or link to any content that is infringing on another's intellectual property rights.

In the same event, the youtube-dl code repository had previously been removed from GitHub after being served with a takedown notice by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). After spending more time investigating the situation, Github was eventually able to restore it.

DuckDuckGo

The DuckDuckGo search engine is the first choice for online consumers who value their privacy. Instead of storing users' IP addresses or other sensitive information, the site, unlike many competitors, does not store this information on its servers.

DuckDuckGo has emerged as one of the most popular Google-alternative search engines in recent years, surpassing even Yahoo! It was founded in 2008 with the promise of creating more open and transparent surveys, free of the data collection that occurs on other platforms at the same time.

The search engine has benefited from its popularity not only in terms of privacy but also in terms of the results that are presented since the search engine does not use algorithms in search results to disallow sites that are not considered "relevant."

However, even if DuckDuckGo made an effort to have a widespread shutdown of numerous pirate websites, there are still a few sites that are findable.