Developed by Gabriel Weinberg in 2008, the search engine allows you to find links to illegal movies, TV series, games, music and other content, while Google is likely to offer users legal options – stores, streaming services, official sites.

A blow to piracy

According to the source, DuckDuckGo has stopped showing search results for major illegal sites, including:

• Pirate Bay,
• 1337x,
• Movies,
• NYAA.se,
• Lookmovie.io.

They’re not just lacking in generality – even a search limited to domains yields no results.

Interestingly, the source posted screenshots showing the attempt to search for The Pirate Bay. In the broadcast state, nothing came out. We did a similar experiment. In Ukraine, the site only posted a link to the main page, but does not search for content on the site itself.

Search result / Screenshot 24 channel on DuckDuckGo

The lack of results is not country dependent, manually moving the region parameters did not change the results of the issue. It looks like DuckDuckgo has removed all thepiratebay.org URLs from its index.

As for the less popular pirated sources, especially the Russian ones, they are all still in place and continue to be returned.

Due to its popularity, DuckDuckGo owes much of its reputation to a censorship-free search engine that cares about the privacy of its users. Does this somehow affect the pirated view count? It’s difficult because the user can easily search not on DuckDuckGo, but on the site itself.

The administration has not yet commented on the new regime.