DuckDuckGo insists it didn’t ‘purge’ piracy sites from search results
Users of privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo have been unable to site search the domains of some well-known pirated media sites recently, as reported by TorrentFreak on Friday. DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg called it “completely made up,” tweeting over the weekend that this is the result of a site operator error. Weinberg insisted the company is not purging any results. “Anyone can verify this by searching for an outlet and see it come up in results,” Weinberg tweeted.
To observers, it seemed as if DuckDuckGo had de-indexed searches for copyright-flouting media download sites like The Pirate Bay and Fmovies, and even a site search for the open-source tool youtube-dl came up empty. TorrentFreak later updated its report citing a company spokesperson blaming 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 this response from senior communications manager Allison Goodman:
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 Verge was told the new behavior is not targeted to piracy-linked sites. “We are having issues with our site: operator, and not just for these sites,” wrote Goodman. “Some of the other sites routinely change domain names and have spotty availability, and so naturally come in and out of the index but should be available as of now.” The Verge was able to observe these changes: a Friday search for “site:thepiratebay.org spider-man” gave zero results (including the absence of the main site), but today, the search does at least yield the thepiratebay.org website — but not anything within.
The Pirate Bay was completely suppressed this weekend, but now DuckDuckGo at least shows the domain as a result.
Screenshot: Jay Peters and Umar Shakir
Like Goodman, Weinberg claimed site operators are sparingly used and downplayed it 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.
No matter what’s causing the change, this is the second recent dust-up for DuckDuckGo over its search results. In March, the company responded to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by saying it would down-rank sites spreading 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 DDG spokesperson Kamyl Bazbaz told Recode, “This isn’t censorship. It’s just search rankings.”
Related Questions
- 2022-08-20 Google is seeking to improve search results by preventing unoriginal content
- 2022-08-16 Microsoft will turn off TLS 1.0 and 1.1 in Internet Explorer and EdgeHTML on September 13
- 2022-08-15 Google releases Read Along for the web: Teaching children how to read
- 2022-08-14 Screencasts not recording in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS? Here’s how to fix that
- 2022-08-11 Google Search’s answer snippets should now provide higher quality answers
Your opinion
- Hot Ranking
-
- How to upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11 for free
- How to avoid duplicate form page submissions
- What is a weakly typed programming language
- How to pass PHP variables to JavaScript in WordPress
- Difference between line break markers and paragraph markers
- How to implement browser forward and backward functions for web form buttons
- What is window.postMessage in HTML5?
- The table layout is suddenly very confusing
- What is an XML document declaration?
- What is a scripting language
- The impact of automatic caching on dynamic pages
- How To Determine Whether PHP Is Good for My Website or WordPress?
- The role of the unordered list ul tag
- What is the difference between fixed and absolute?
- What values can be used for the background-position property?
- Latest Answer
-
-
How to avoid duplicate form page submissions
family porno free video Answer 2022-04-12 22:06:03
-
How to avoid duplicate form page submissions
free porno wc Answer 2022-04-04 17:47:28
-
How to avoid duplicate form page submissions
binary options system strategy page Answer 2022-04-01 03:42:00
-
The impact of automatic caching on dynamic pages
binary options magnet scams elderly Answer 2022-03-29 14:06:24
-
How To Determine Whether PHP Is Good for My Website or WordPress?
แอพเปลี่ยนรูปเป็นภาพวาด Answer 2022-03-27 18:27:12
-