Slashdot Mirror
Search Engine DuckDuckGo Removes 'Pirate' Site Bangs To Avoid Liability (torrentfreak.com)
DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused search engine, offers a variety of useful features such as instant answers and bangs. The latter are particularly useful for people who want to use DuckDuckGo to search directly on other sites. Typing '!yt keyword', for instance, will do a direct search on YouTube, while '!w keyword' goes to Wikipedia. This library of bangs has been around for a long time and has grown to more than 10,000 over the years.
From a report: However, a few days ago, roughly 2,000 of these were removed. Interestingly, this included many bangs that link to torrent sites, such as The Pirate Bay, 1337x and RARBG. Similarly, bangs for OpenSubtitles, Sci-Hub and LibGen are gone too. Initially, it was unclear what had happened, but after people started asking questions on Reddit, DuckDuckGo staff explained that this was part of a larger cleanup operation. DuckDuckGo went through its bangs library and removed all non-working versions, as well as verbose ones that were not actively used. In addition, many pirate site bangs were deleted as these are no longer"permitted."
"Bangs had been neglected for some time, and there were tons of broken ones. As part of the bang clean-up, we also removed some that were pointing to primarily illegal content," DuckDuckGo staffer Tagawa explains. The search engine still indexes the sites in question but it feels that offering curated search shortcuts for these sites in their service might cause problems. "It may not seem like so at first blush, but it is very different legally if it is a bang vs. in the search results because the bangs are added to the product by us explicitly, and can be interpreted legally as an editorial decision that is actively facilitating that site and its content," the staff wrote.
From a report: However, a few days ago, roughly 2,000 of these were removed. Interestingly, this included many bangs that link to torrent sites, such as The Pirate Bay, 1337x and RARBG. Similarly, bangs for OpenSubtitles, Sci-Hub and LibGen are gone too. Initially, it was unclear what had happened, but after people started asking questions on Reddit, DuckDuckGo staff explained that this was part of a larger cleanup operation. DuckDuckGo went through its bangs library and removed all non-working versions, as well as verbose ones that were not actively used. In addition, many pirate site bangs were deleted as these are no longer"permitted."
"Bangs had been neglected for some time, and there were tons of broken ones. As part of the bang clean-up, we also removed some that were pointing to primarily illegal content," DuckDuckGo staffer Tagawa explains. The search engine still indexes the sites in question but it feels that offering curated search shortcuts for these sites in their service might cause problems. "It may not seem like so at first blush, but it is very different legally if it is a bang vs. in the search results because the bangs are added to the product by us explicitly, and can be interpreted legally as an editorial decision that is actively facilitating that site and its content," the staff wrote.
Before other things go as well in the name of liability.
DDG has positioned itself as a privacy-oriented search engine. I have used them almost exclusively for years. But search engines should be neutral. If it exists on the net, they should find it (except for criminally illegal content like child pr0n). But this action seems counter to that, and feels counter to their core beliefs. Sure, they market themselves as a SE that doesn't track you, but the demographic that uses them isn't going to be pleased by this.
As long as the site: prefix still works who cares.
Ivan, if you're going to attempt a US civics joke, it'd behoove (Or behoof, you cloven-footed swine..) you to get the damn terminology right. It's LAME duck, not SITTING DUCK. A sitting duck President = Trump @ Mueller's feet.
Suddenly, ~1900 of the least known piracy sites have a huge uptick in visitors. No such thing as bad publicity.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
...In case anybody was still unsure about US tech, whose political loyalty or blinders is assured (tax liabilities aside, thank you very much).
I've never heard it used to describe search results.
Generally to me it means that tuff of hair immediately in the front of your face (fringe for you UKers) and of course the act of repeatedly entering and exiting a certain place a subset of Slashdot and 4chan can only imagine.
Fun fact, DDG DOES filter results. Typically those of adult websites but I've run into "hacking" sites too. Doing the same search on bing (yuck), returns both their resutls and the filtered. DDG also recycles the same results so you end up scrolling.. More pages, more ad hits.
My guess is the influence of Yandex and the recycling of results being cause by asychronious background searching. You may see more results if you wait a minute or two after the first page before continuing.
What the hell is a "Pirate Site Bang"????
Can you post the full list of banned tags? I would like to know for "research purposes."
Anyone?
Just use filertype:torrent on google. Works great.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
of Google. but now I changed it back to Google.
Duckduckgo changes is promises, so I will not use it anymore.
use anything other than google, you cuck.
interesting that bing appears to be censoring less than ddg at this point