DuckDuckGo clarifies: We are not “purging” any media outlets from results

DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg has called out previous report regarding their private search engine not showing popular piracy websites on search results.

Weinberg on a tweet dated April 27, called it “completely made-up” that the matter was only caused by site operator error.

Hoping to clear up some misconceptions about our private search engine.

First, there is a completely made up headline going around this weekend. We are not “purging” any media outlets from results. Anyone can verify this by searching for an outlet and see it come up in results.

— Gabriel Weinberg (@yegg) April 17, 2022

“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 explained.

As reported by TorrentFreak last Friday, pirate domains like The Pirate Bay and Fmovies were de-indexed from the search engine, including the open-source tool YouTube-dl.

TorrentFreak had updated the said report citing a DuckDuckGo spokesperson blaming the issue to Bing search data which the DuckDuckGo is based upon.

In a further inquiry by The Verge, DuckDuckGo’s senior communications manager Allison Goodman told, “We are having issues with our site: operator, and not just for these sites.”

“Some of the other sites routinely change domain names and have spotty availability, and so naturally come in and out of the index but should be available as of now,” Goodman added.

DuckDuckGo shedding light to this matter, YugaTech has observed today that a search for “site:thepiratebay.org” now yields a result showing the website link, as compared to last week’s query when no results came up.