DuckDuckGo didn’t show torrent sites due to ‘changes to Bing’

DuckDuckGo says it stopped showing certain search results due to changes to Bing. The privacy search engine uses data from Bing to display search results. Due to the error, The Pirate Bay and youtube-dl, among others, could no longer be found via DuckDuckGo.

It’s not clear what changes happened to Bing that prevented DuckDuckGo from showing certain search results. Presumably these are results that were removed after DMCA requests from rights holders. A spokesperson says to TorrentFreak only that the problem is “related to using Bing data.” DuckDuckGo uses “hundreds” of data sources, including Bing, to provide search results.

The search results that disappeared are torrent sites like 1337x and YouTube rippers like youtube-dl. The search engine organization can add the results, but this seems to be a manual process. It’s not clear if DuckDuckGo is working on another solution to the problem. Certain sites are still not available through DuckDuckGo due to the Bing problem, TorrentFreak writes.

The torrent news site published for the first time about the missing search results at the end of last week. At the time, it still seemed to be a conscious act by DuckDuckGo, something that DuckDuckGo CEO and founder Gabriel Weinberg contradicted on Twitter. He then said the problem was with the site: search function to search specific sites, and said the youtube-dl and The Pirate Bay results were always findable. TorrentFreak says those results couldn’t be found even without a site: