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...