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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.
As long as the site: prefix still works who cares.
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!
If it exists on the net, they should find it (except for criminally illegal content like child pr0n).
So which is it then? Either they censor, or they don't.
To get around this problem, Yacy could use a hell of a lot more users...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Bang is another name for the exclamation point. DuckDuckGo has a few thousand shortcuts for site:example.com domains. Each of these shortcuts begins with the exclamation point.
Bang is an alternate name for the exclamation mark, depending on how it is used. Similar to how # could be a "pound sign" a "number sign" or "hashtag". Typically a bang is used in a word. For instance, to represent a tongue cluck sound used in some languages. On DDG, it's used to precede a short description that tells how to search. !g (pronounced "bang g") searches google, !w searches wikipedia, etc.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Bang is another name for the exclamation point.
It'll always be a pling to me.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
And * is called a Nathan Hale, as in "I regret I have 1 ass to risk"....
I shave my neck daily, why do you ask?
" 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."
Meh. not really.
bangs are basically a type of hosted 'form bookmark'; where you can select an online form, complete it, and submit it all from the address bar.
!g xyz
is basically, go to the page booked mark named !g, put xyz in the search field, and then submit the form.
I don't think anyone *really* expects ddg to provide and maintain such booksmarks to pirate sites.
If it exists on the net, they should find it (except for criminally illegal content like child pr0n).
Playing the devil's advocate here - if they're truly neutral they should find that too. But they should call the authorities, whose job it is to shut those places down. Not try to pretend to be the authority and take it on themselves. That's how you start sliding down the slippery slope of non neutrality.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
You can get the same results without the "bang" shortcut feature.
Neo-nerds, alt-nerds, nerd-inlaws, nerdcomers, noob-nerds, etc.
Typing '!yt keyword', for instance, will do a direct search on YouTube
And if you type '!! keyword' it searches Pornhub.
A hash by itself is not a hashtag. When there is a hash followed by a word (tag) then it becomes one.
Being a snitch for the state is worse. The list of forbidden words can only grow.
The fact is, you can't depend on any single company subject to any jurisdiction. As long as information is treated as contraband, we need to compensate.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
https://blog.codinghorror.com/ascii-pronunciation-rules-for-programmers/
There you go.
Us old timer geeks got sick and tired of pronouncing symbols by their proper names containing far too many syllables. So we made one-syllable and on occasion two-syllable nicknames for nearly all of them.
It prevents much stabbing and bloodshed on the rare occasions we had to speak with each other.
They aren't delisting anything in the regular search results. They're only removing some listings from the group they promote, because these links seem to have their implicit approval.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Just use filertype:torrent on google. Works great.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
To be the devils, devils advocate. They should NOT report it, as it is not up to them to deciide if something is illegal or not. For that you have a legal system.
The moment they decide if something is criminal or not.
Be it a torrent link, childporn, terrorism or people using Emacs instead of vi.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Hashtag Octothorpe
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I had never thought about why #! is called "shebang" but now I know, plus Wikipedia enlightened me further.
Interesting, I'd actually never hear of Yacy before now.
Argh, I could have used that link when I was learning scripting. The references used the terms interchangeably, and assumed the jargon to be universal. Anyway, thanks.