DuckDuckGo’s crackdown on dodgy content material now extends to digital bootleggers. TorrentFreak has found that the search engine now not lists outcomes for some main pirate web sites, together with The Pirate Bay, 1337x and Fmovies — search for something from their domains and you will come up empty-handed. Streaming and stream-ripping websites like Flixtor and 2conv additionally produce no outcomes, whereas different pirate shops (reminiscent of RarBG) might solely flip up one end result as a substitute of the a whole bunch of hundreds you see elsewhere.
The web site for the video obtain instrument YouTube-dl additionally produces no outcomes regardless of current defenses of its legality. While the RIAA has portrayed YouTube-dl as a piracy instrument, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, GitHub and others discovered that it does not rip DRM-protected materials.
We’ve requested DuckDuckGo for remark. As TorrentFreak says, although, legal responsibility for copyright violations could be a problem. The firm eliminated pirate “bangs” (shortcuts for pirate websites) way back to 2018, and opponents like Google and Microsoft are already downranking piracy-related outcomes. A transfer like this might defend DuckDuckGo towards expensive copyright battles.