For years, Google has been lowering the ranking of pirate sites in its search results, or even erasing them entirely. DuckDuckGo, a privacy-conscious alternative to search, has resisted taking similar action, making it a good choice for users with copyright protection values.
Back in 2018, to avoid potential copyright liability, DuckDuckGo removed access to about 2,000 “bangs” (shortcuts that let you search directly on specific sites) from copyright infringing sites like Pirate Bay and 1337x, but that didn’t affect the search engine’s own results. Now it seems that this has changed.
As TorrentFreak discovered, DuckDuckGo has removed some popular pirate sites from its search list. In its investigation, the news site noted that Pirate Bay, 1337x.to, NYAA.se, Fmovies.to, Lookmovie.io and 123moviesfree.net no longer appear in DuckDuckGo’s searches.
That’s not all — youtube-dl.org, the official website of the popular open-source YouTube download manager youtube-dl, also appears to have been removed, though it doesn’t host (or link to) any copyright-infringing material.
There is no official word yet on when this action was taken, or why, but it seems certain that it was for copyright reasons. For now, DuckDuckGo still returns more pirate site results than Google, but that just seems to be the beginning of making it harder for users to find these sites.