Digital bootleggers and dubious content are now the focus of DuckDuckGo’s new crackdown on illegal activity. An analysis by TorrentFreak found that some of the most prominent pirate websites, such as The Pirate Bay, 1337x, as well as Fmovies, no longer appear in the search results. streaming and streaming-ripping sites like Flixtor and 2conv provide no results, while other pirate sources may only return one result instead of hundreds.
There are no results on the YouTube-dl site, despite recent complaints about its legality. Claims that YouTube-dl is being used to unlawfully obtain copyrighted video are false, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other groups.
There are still a few websites and tools that show up in DuckDuckGo’s search results. Using the search terms “The Pirate Bay” or “youtube-dl,” the right GitHub repositories may be found.
DuckDuckGo Response
DuckDuckGo, on the other hand, claims that the sites have not been removed from its index and provides an explanation for this. According to their declaration, technical issues were behind this issue, not censorship as users suspected.
”After looking into this, our records indicate that YouTube-dl and The Pirate Bay were never removed from our search results when you searched for them directly by name or URL, which the vast majority of people do (it’s rare for people to use site operators or query operators in general). Most everyone searching for these sites were finding them without interruption.
We are having issues with our site: operator, and not just for these sites, but now at least the official site should be coming up for them when you use the site: operator for them. Some of the other sites routinely change domain names and have spotty availability, and so naturally come in and out of the index, but should be available as of now,” declared DuckDuckGo.
