Google Search is the largest search engine, and it has been in the business for decades.
Since then, Google has been continuously crawling the web for more web pages, documents, images, and re-index them whenever necessary. DuckDuckGo is a much younger and smaller search engine, and for it to index the entire web from the beginning by its own means and resources would be next to impossible.
As a privacy-focused search engine that is 'anti-Google', the most obvious thing it did was partnering with others.
And among its many sources, the company partnered with Bing, the search engine from Microsoft.
This time, the removal of some popular pirated websites from DuckDuckGo's search engine results pages confused people.
It was never DuckDuckGo's intention to remove websites like The Pirate Bay or YouTube-dl from its search results.
That is because according to DuckDuckGo, it was all Bing's fault.
It all began a few days earlier, when users started noticing a number of high-profile pirate websites were unfindable in DuckDuckGo's search results.
At the time, it wasn't clear why the domains had been 'removed,' but it was initially reported that DuckDuckGo's in removing the websites from its search results stems from its attempt to make its indexed database free from dodgy content and digital bootleggers.
According to many reports, copyright violations might be the cause.
DuckDuckGo has previously removed pirate "bangs" (shortcuts for pirate sites) as far back as 2018, and competitors like Google and Microsoft are already downranking piracy-related results.
A move like this could protect DuckDuckGo against costly copyright battles.
In response to the allegations and confusions, DuckDuckGo responded by saying that it was a "completely made up headline."
According to founder and CEO of DuckDuckGo, Gabriel Weinberg, the search engine never removed anything.
Read: DuckDuckGo Starts To 'Down-Rank' Websites That Spread Disinformation
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
Instead, the problems were attributed to the “site:” search operator.
"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," Weinberg wrote.
Later, some of the removed websites from DuckDuckGo began to reappear, even when users use the "broken" site: operator.
These suggest that the problem was indeed a temporary technical issue.
Later, Bing is mentioned as the culprit.
"Yes, this is related to using data from Bing," said DuckDuckGo’s Senior Communications Manager Allison Goodman.
"Since these occurrences originated on Bing, they were passed down to our results, as well as other Bing syndication partners."
Just be careful with your public statements.
— Sam Izby (@NotDeveloper) April 19, 2022