DuckDuckGo’s Suppression of cunning content now extended to digital starters. TorrentFreak yes discovered that search engines no longer list results for some of the major pirate sites, including The Pirate Bay, 1337x and Fmovies – search for anything from their domain and you’ll be left empty-handed. Streaming and ripping sites like Flixtor and 2conv also produce no results, while other piracy outlets (such as RarBG) may only show one result instead of hundreds. thousand you see elsewhere.
Website for video downloader YouTube-dl also produced no results despite recently defending its legitimacy. While the RIAA describes YouTube-dl as a piracy tool, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, GitHub, and others have found that it does not copy DRM-protected material.
We have asked DuckDuckGo for comment. As TorrentFreak says, however, that liability for piracy can be an issue. The company has been phasing out pirate “bangs” (shortcuts for pirating websites) since 2018, and competitors like Google and Microsoft have downgrade results related to piracy. A move like this could protect DuckDuckGo from costly copyright battles.
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