DuckDuckGo says tampering allegations 'completely made up'

(Image: Internet search engine DuckDuckGo)

DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg has denied reports the privacy-focused search engine was purging results for popular “pirate” sites, tweeting that the allegations were "completely made up".

Weinberg said the company was not "purging" any search results and "anyone can verify this by searching for an outlet and see it come up in results."

He blamed the missing results on the site: operator function and said they were "having issues which we are looking into".

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

Weinberg also said that DuckDuckGo does not save or see search history, which means it couldn't alter the results based on user search history.

Also Read: DuckDuckGo brings Apple-inspired App Tracking Protection for Android

Torrentfreak had reported that popular torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay, 1337x and Fmovies among others not showing up in search results on the engine over the weekend. They now seem to be appearing.

This didn't sit well with users, as DuckDuckGo is a popular alternative because it doesn't filter or downrank results based on the query.

Over time, DuckDuckGo appeared to be removing search shortcuts for pirate websites. These shortcuts known as "bangs" can potentially lead to copyright action. The engine removed nearly 2,000 bangs for popular pirate sites.

The latest development makes it look like DuckDuckGo is removing pirate sites from search results altogether.

Also Read: Google drops FLoC as replacement for third-party cookies, opts for Topics API instead

In a statement shared with Torrentfreak, DuckDuckGo said, “After looking into this, our records indicate that YouTube-dl and The Pirate Bay were not removed from our search results when you searched for them directly by name or URL—as you noted in your piece. This is how the vast majority of people navigate to a page."

The company also confirmed that they were having issues with Bing (owned by Microsoft) search engine data.