DuckDuckGo removes top pirate sites from search results

DuckDuckGo removes many pirate sites from search results to avoid future legal battles.

DuckDuckGo is a search engine and, more recently, a web browser that is very interesting in many ways, especially because it protects your privacy and your personal data. This does not mean that he promotes illegal content in any way. Some well-known pirate sites have simply disappeared from the engine’s search results recently.

DuckDuckGo removed many pirate sites from search results

DuckDuckGo continues its hunt for questionable content, so to speak, and now it’s extending to digital smugglers. TorrentFreak did find that the search engine no longer offers many well-known pirate sites such as The Pirate Bay, 1337x or Fmovies in its results – search for any of these domain names and you’ll get an empty list of results -. Streaming or streaming rip sites like Flixtor and 2conv also no longer give any results, while other pirate showcases like RarBG now only show one result instead of the hundreds or thousands found on other engines.

to avoid future legal battles

The YouTube-dl video download tool site also no longer returns results, despite recent defenses of its legality. Although the RIAA touted YouTube-dl as a hacking tool, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, GitHub, and others have found that it does not copy DRM-protected content.

DuckDuckGo has been contacted for comment on this matter. However, as TorrentFreak points out, liability for copyright infringement can be a problem. The company has been removing pirate sites from search results since 2018, and competitors like Google and Microsoft are already degrading pirate sites in their results. Such an initiative could protect DuckDuckGo from very costly copyright lawsuits.