Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo removes over 2000 “bangs” or search shortcuts that includes major pirate websites The Pirate Bay, 1337x, and Fmovies among others.
According to TorrentFreak, they noticed that several popular pirate sites were no longer showing up on DuckDuckGo’s search results, regardless of location.
They claim that these pirate domains are deindexed by the search engine. For example, upon searching for “site:thepiratebay.org” that supposed to return results DuckDuckGo has indexed for the main domain name, however, there were none.
These so-called “bangs” were regarded as potential copyright infringement liability, thus come to its removal.
“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,” explained Tagawa of DuckDuckGo !Bang.
Moreover, the open-source video download tool YouTube-dl was also removed despite its defense on legality.
The said software previously took hit from Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and was removed from the GitHub website. But eventually, GitHub restored YouTube-dl as it was found not ripping DRM-protected material.
DuckDuckGo has not yet clarified on the matter, but at least the official GitHub repository and the main domain names of the piracy websites are still findable.
