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Popular Pirate Sites ‘Disappear’ from DuckDuckGo’s Top Search Results
- snarfy 6y agoSince ddg uses bing's api, I wonder if the disappearance on ddg is due to bing censoring.
- s9w 6y agoNah, still showing up on bing.
- abc-xyz 6y agoMost likely. It’s also funny to see TorrentFreak write: > Unlike DuckDuckGo, Bing notes at the bottom of the page that “some results have been removed.” The reason DuckDuckGo doesn’t display similar notes is likely because they don’t know any sites have been removed (since Bing’s API doesn’t include this info). Copyright holders have no need to contact DDG and other Bing wrappers, they just need to get Microsoft to remove the websites from their API.
- ximeng 6y agoThe best long term solution to overbearing copyright is to create more content with permissive licenses. E.g. David Revoy creates art using open source software: https://www.davidrevoy.com/ https://www.davidrevoy.com/ Just as Microsoft and Apple would no doubt have even more locked down OSes if there wasn’t a fallback of Linux, so the more competition for people’s attention that is not controlled by large corporations, the less bargaining and coercive power they will have.
- coldtea 6y agoThe best long term solution to overbearing copyright is to make people not depend on salaries for living. Because else, all other things like talent being equal, a lot of the best content will be from those that have the income/time (afforded by income)/resources (afforded by income)/practice time (afforded by income)/etc to create it, and thus be given for pay, not with a permissive license. Especially true for things that have different "production values" that cost money (movies, music, animation, and so on) - might not apply to e.g. poetry or other arts, or, in your example, to someone drawining comics (which can be done on the cheap).
- thotsBgone 6y agoGood luck making Breaking Bad with a permissive license.
- bko 6y agoI made an app that lets you compare duck-duck-go results with that of google, side by side [0][1]. One thing I found is how bad ddg is at removing conspiracy theories and other misinformation. Google is, for better or for worse, much more managed. For instance, search "are vaccines dangerous", google replies with .org and .gov sites, while ddg promotes dangersofvaccines.com. Even if you search "dangers of vaccines" in google, it still never produces that site. [0] https://search-compare.netlify.app/ https://search-compare.netlify.app/ [1] https://github.com/breeko/search-compare https://github.com/breeko/search-compare
- diggan 6y agoThat's a cool site, you should submit it to "Show HN" if you haven't already :) Not sure if your site is taking the location into account, but when I do the "are vaccines dangerous" search on the search-compare website, I get .gov and .edu domains as the top 5 hits or so.
- bko 6y agoGlad you like my site. It was fun to build. I remember bing use to have a site years ago where you would search for a term and see bing vs google results and you'd pick the one you preferred, and apparently 2/3 people preferred bing results. But I couldn't find it, so it gave me an idea to build a site but I didn't build the gamified portion. Yeah, you're right about search results. I'm seeing more normal sites now as well. The results are not deterministic. I'm not sure whats causing it, but I saw different results for the vaccines query earlier. "Flat earth" still gives me a fair amount of flat earth content. From the FAQ: > For Duck Duck Go, search-compare searches the html version (e.g. duckduckgo.com/html/?q=search). The results are different than the canonical duckduckgo search, but its easier to scrape. For Google, search-compare uses the main google site (e.g. google.com/search?hl=en&q=search), but it doesn't pass any personally identifiable information
- mellosouls 6y agoSpeaking as somebody who goes with mainstream expert opinion by default, I nevertheless think there's enough censorship from the big tech providers, at the very least let's have such "filter out stuff that annoys us" initiatives as optional.
- smaryjerry 6y agoIs the government so inept that it can’t do it’s policing itself? Why are search companies being forced to police the internet for the police? If there was a business down the street doing illegal gambling, I would not say “hey let’s just stop buses from taking people there.” Hell no. Any decent police would go stop that business from operating, not go to the bus companies taking people there.
- wmf 6y agoThere was massive online opposition to that idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PIPA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PIPA
- schoen 6y agoYou could argue that SOPA and PIPA were more like "stopping the buses from taking people there", although these analogies are rarely exact.
- CWuestefeld 6y ago"illegal" means different things regionally. One locale's legal content is considered elsewhere in another. We don't all want to be bound by China's laws. And even in America, most laws are at the state level (e.g., ads for marijuana are OK in much of the country, but definitely not for Texas), so we wouldn't even want to resort to "American" standards.
- michaelmrose 6y agoPeople can run both VPN services and pirate websites which merely index torrents in jurisdictions that wont stop such. Then when bob shares files with sue over their respective torrent clients all their packets travel overseas before reaching each other. These tools aren't harder for end users to use than netflix or Hulu. VPN services tend to provide a gui app with a big ol button that says connect and a tray icon that turns from red to green. They pretty much have to be content with trying to keep the bus from going there because its all they have. The smarter plan is still continuing to make Netflix and Steam awesome so people don't want to bother to pirate.
- mci 6y agoMeh. Three words every pirate should know: yandex dot ru.
- ffpip 6y agoAre the search results on yandex.com different from yandex.ru ?
- spurgu 6y agoLet me, eh, yandex that for you: https://i.imgur.com/JgUxoTk.png https://i.imgur.com/JgUxoTk.png
- Dylan16807 6y agoAn example of one search being the same, when that search isn't likely to trigger any takedowns/removals, isn't very helpful.
- inquirerofsorts 6y agohttps://yandex.com/search/?text=the pirate bay https://yandex.ru/search/?text=the pirate bay Takes less time than writing that comment.
- fotad 6y agoyandex.ru ask me to solve the captcha which is very long and tiny text, probably will take years...
- BlueTemplar 6y agoHmm, how long before rights holders turn their Sauron Eye towards Wikipedia ?
- wmf 6y agoDoes Wikipedia make it easy to find pirated content?
- acover 6y agoYou can look up the current url to a site on Wikipedia.
- inquirerofsorts 6y agoIt's the only reliable source of urls now in the shifting sands of registrar removals.
- spurgu 6y agoHey, it just hit me: Is there a search engine (meta or otherwise out there) where I can up/downvote sites (or otherwise customize the rankings)? Let's say I search for something HTML/JS/CSS related, I would generally want to prioritize MDN over W3Schools, but now I'm at the mercy of whatever the search engine decides is higher relevancy. I realize dynamic search results could be quite heavy, but it wouldn't necessarily have to be... Or if I'm just tired of CNN results when searching for news topics I could just downvote them and get other news sites prioritized. I don't want a search engine to choose these preferences/filters for me, and I don't want "unfiltered" stuff like conspiracy theories in my top hits either just because they're popular.
- rakoo 6y agoHaven't tried it, but the architecture of Yacy probably allows it: crawlers everywhere have the index data, and you can define the importance of this or that criteria from your own portal
- l0b0 6y agoUnfortunately any such scheme nowadays would be a lucrative target (to say the least) for bots and mechanical Turks. It would basically just become another SEO metric. Instead you can exclude a specific site using "-site:example.com". This works on at least DDG and Google. Now, if only search engines would let me save those exclusions as preferences (even in a cookie, in case of privacy-focused search engines like DDG) I could blacklist a whole bunch of high-SEO crap sites. That would be a game changer: one black pattern and you're out of my search results.
- resfirestar 6y agoI see moves like this as seriously harmful. By removing popular pirate sites (already shady enough), search engines steer traffic to even worse places: referral spam blogs, mirrors with malware-laden ads, abandoned and spam-filled forums, etc. Boosting these sites directly aids malware campaigns like SocGholish that use poorly secured blogs and forums to spread trojans that are then used to give access to ransomware operators, like WastedLocker (which has no qualms with targeting hospitals). But Hollywood's imaginary lost revenues justify any unintended consequences, right?
- yakireev 6y agoHarmful for whom? For common folks, who are trying to download a movie but get a virus instead - yes, very harmful. For the parties who have a say about the situation - not really: Google/Bing/DDG lose nothing (given that all search engines behave the same), "copyright holders" win. This is a part of the effort to decrease visibility of piracy and to drive to the "freak" zone: "piracy is illegal and dangerous, so better go watch some Netflix, kids!". And it has been successful so far: how many teenagers you know who pirate stuff? A few generations ago it was normal, but now it isn't.
- resfirestar 6y agoI think the lesser popularity of piracy with the younger generations is somewhat less about intentional takedown-based anti-piracy efforts and more their preference for mobile devices and the "pirate" options failing to keep up while the legal streaming services are worlds better than they were 10 years ago. Apple not allowing torrent clients on the app store definitely helped, though. That comes back to the broader narrative of the war on general-purpose computers: perhaps the most effective anti-piracy effort of all has been selling people devices that run crippled OSes like iOS and Android instead of Windows.
- matheusmoreira 6y ago> But Hollywood's imaginary lost revenues justify any unintended consequences, right? In their minds, yes. They're absolutely self-righteous about their data monopoly. We had a thread about a content decryption key leak some days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25078096 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25078096 Here's some fun posts... > Who remembers when TPB were going to buy Sealand in order to host trackers out of the reach of authorities? > Isn't Sealand just a couple of underwater charges planted by some clandestine operatives away from not existing? > I'd love to see the day we're launching missiles at foreign ships over copyright violations. Speculating about borderline terrorist behavior is fun but it would surprise no one if it actually happened. Copyright is "legitimate" and so such operations would not even be clandestine. The copyright industry has access to actual police forces who respond with extreme violence whenever someone threatens the artificial scarcity of their imaginary property even though the perpretators are not violent themselves.
- gnufx 6y agoAs a quick test, 1337x.to is near the top in mojeek, exalead, infinitysearch, ecloud spot (searx).
- 18af219e 6y agodoes DDG or similar search engines support searching based on 'takedown' or similar notices?