DuckDuckGo insists it didn’t ‘purge’ piracy sites from search results

Image: DuckDuckGo.com

Users of privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo have been unable to site search the domain of some well-known piracy sites recently. Gabriel Weinberg, CEO of DuckDuckGo, said on the weekend that it was the result of a site operator error. Weinberg said anyone can check the results by searching for an outlet.

To observers, it seemed as if DuckDuckGo had removed links to copyrighted sites like The Pirate Bay and Fmovies, and even a site search for the open-source tool youtube-dl came up empty. According to the report, a company spokesman blamed the issue on Bing search data, which DuckDuckGo relies upon.

Similarly, we are not "purging" YouTube-dl or The Pirate Bay and they both have actually been continuously available in our results if you search for them by name (which most people do). Our site: operator (which hardly anyone uses) is having issues which we are looking into.

— Gabriel Weinberg (@yegg) April 17, 2022

We reached out to DuckDuckGo about the issue and received a response from Allison.

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).

The new behavior is not targeted at piracy-linked sites.

Screenshot: Jay Peters and Umar Shakir

The site operators are downplayed as an issue.

Similarly, we are not “purging” YouTube-dl or The Pirate Bay and they both have actually been continuously available in our results if you search for them by name (which most people do). Our site: operator (which hardly anyone uses) is having issues which we are looking into.

This is the second dust-up for DuckDuckGo over its search results. The company responded to Russia's invasion of Ukraine by saying it would down-rank sites that spread Russian misinformation. Right-wing figures who had promoted it as an alternative to Google claimed it had abandoned principles of free speech for censorship, while a spokesman for the DFG told Recode that this isn't censorship. It's just a search.