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“YouTube-dl” and “Pirate Bay” back on DDG
- PaulKeeble 4y agoThe youtube-dl homepage has returned to the listings as has thepiratebay. However they still aren't indexing thepiratebay or youtube-dl.org's contents so you can't search within the sites you only get the homepage. The complaint the other day was about the indexes too, so its only partially fixed.
- yegg 4y agoThat's not actually true. Our site search is having issues, so better to just add the site name to the search, but note that youtube-dl.org is just one page and for other sites (that are essentially vertical search engines) you're better off going directly to them since their index is going to be more up to date.
- pkdpic 4y agoSorry to be that guy but what was going on? This is alarming as someone who uses DDG and youtube-dl kinda too much probably. Also if anyone else is slightly hung over and searches DDG in DDG and gets super confused for three seconds because DDG is a rapper apparently just know you aren't alone. I'm right here with you, whoever you are.
- fuckcensorship 4y agoThese links should provide the additional context you’re looking for: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31044587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31044587 https://nitter.net/i/status/1515635886855233537 https://nitter.net/i/status/1515635886855233537
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jt2190 4y agoFrom an April 17 Twitter thread from Gabriel Weinberg at DuckDuckGo: > ... [W]e 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. (Note that "site:" in his comment is how you restrict DDG searches to a specific domain e.g. "site:example.com") https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1515636218691739653 https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1515636218691739653
- naoqj 4y agoDid the original complaints of those sites disappearing mention the usage of the site: filter?
- jt2190 4y agoYes. > For example, searching for “site:thepiratebay.org” is supposed to return all results DuckDuckGo has indexed for The Pirate Bay’s main domain name. In this case, there are none. > This whole-site removal isn’t limited to The Pirate Bay either. When we do similar searches for ["site:1337x.to", "site:NYAA.se", "site:Fmovies.to", site:"Lookmovie.io"], and ["site:123moviesfree.net"], no results appear. https://torrentfreak.com/duckduckgo-removes-pirate-sites-and-youtube-dl-from-its-search-results-220415/ https://torrentfreak.com/duckduckgo-removes-pirate-sites-and...
- OJFord 4y agoThat's incomplete though, when I tried it (in response to seeing it posted here a couple of days ago) I couldn't get any yt-dl.org search results, i.e. adding site: appeared to function correctly - no results.
- codetrotter 4y ago>> Our site: operator (which hardly anyone uses) is having issues which we are looking into I noticed problems with their site: operator too earlier today, and still now as well. In my case, when I used it in a search I saw that the word “site” itself was also bolded in some results. So it looks like it is using the operator itself also as a search term, which it shouldn’t. I find it surprising that hardly anyone uses it though.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- icare_1er 4y agoMaybe DDG understood that they have no purpose if all they have to propose is Google's bad sides and censorship, without Google's search power...
- whoopdedo 4y agoStill missing from Bing. So this is DDG inserting an override.
- alyandon 4y agoThat is really strange - I just searched for both on bing.com and got relevant results back. Search bubble?
- jug 4y agoOr search region? I’ve had different results before based on your Bing/DDG region setting.
- whoopdedo 4y agoIndeed. My search was done in a fresh private window on a computer I never typically use Bing on. Also, throughout this whole situation I always got the Github page as the first result for "youtube-dl".
- bilkow 4y agoI also find that searching Bing does not result in youtube-dl.org, only the repository, while DDG returns both, but Bing is not the ONLY source for DDG results, at least according to them. https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so... "We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google)." I've tried comparing Google, Bing and DDG on a private window before, and I didn't find Bing and DDG more similar than Bing and Google. Searching for monkey: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27598329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27598329
- Pigalowda 4y agoI had never used youtube-dl until the story happened. I downloaded for windows and its speeds were throttled to around 50kB/s. Posters on Stack recommended the ytdlp fork which i tried and it was 5-10 MB/s. Just fyi
- bspammer 4y agoYeah youtube-dl is missing workarounds for throttling implemented by google. youtube-dl is pretty much unmaintained compared to yt-dlp: https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/graphs/commit-activity https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/graphs/commit-activit... https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/graphs/commit-activity https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/graphs/commit-activity
- vmoore 4y agoAnd yt-dlp uses an 'Android API' to stop throttling
- heavyset_go 4y agoI expect the ability to use APIs like this will be hindered once remote attestation becomes the norm.
- cute_boi 4y agoThis is reason why we must diversify these techs. If same company builds everything like mobile, os, search engine, Youtube, it would have debacle in future. If there is diversification, it simply takes toil and sweat to convince everyone.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 4y agoOne has to execute functions from base.js^1 to modify the "n" URL parameter and the "sig" parameter to get the fastest download speeds. (One can still download videos with the original n parameter, or without the n parameter, but download speeds will be slower.) By itself, using the ANDROID API instead of the WEB API^2 does nothing to affect download speeds. I can block yt-dlp's POST request indicating the client and API name and this has no effect on download speed. A website that forces users to run Javascript in order to get faster download speeds. This is not a new idea. 1. https://www.youtube.com/s/player/{player_version}/player_ias.vflset/en_US/base.js https://www.youtube.com/s/player/{player_version}/player_ias... 2. From the YouTube video page JSON: ANDROID API KEY AIzaSyA8eiZmM1FaDVjRy-df2KTyQ_vz_yYM39w WEB API KEY AIzaSyAO_FJ2SlqU8Q4STEHLGCilw_Y9_11qcW8
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- wyager 4y agoDDG has been de-listing a ton of stuff recently. They recently de-listed rdrama, a reddit-trolling website that came up on HN last year. What, exactly, do they think people use them for? If I wanted "result curation" or whatever euphemism for censorship, I would just use Google.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y agoThey've removed Yandex and are now at the mercy of Bing's censorship.
- BurdensomeCount 4y agoAmazing that nowadays if you want the best "uncensored" results you have to go to the Russian Yandex (at least on all topics unrelated to Russia). How did our society get to such a point...
- markdown 4y agoIf that isn't a rhetorical question... capitalism.
- mpalczewski 4y ago> capitalism If capitalism caused censorship you would expect the least capitalist places to have the least censorship but the opposite is true.
- kenoph 4y agoIf capitalism causes censorship, that doesn't mean it's necessarily the worst at causing censorship. Additionally, we don't live in a stationary society, so, whatever capitalism did or did not cause in the past might not apply as-is today.
- kenoph 4y agoRelated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
- behnamoh 4y agoSometimes when the damage is done, it's done. I'm never going to use DDG ever again. If this decision was because of legal pressure by Google, I don't see how that got resolved in a matter of days. Which means it wasn't because of Google, but rather a poor decision made by DDG management. How can people trust their product now?
- vmoore 4y ago> I'm never going to use DDG ever again. The removals were a rarity. It's not as if you can't add a `!g` bang query to redirect to Google if you can't find something. And DDG is rampant with all sorts of stuff that shouldn't be there, so I don't think they're hellbent on censorship.
- behnamoh 4y ago!g leads to Google, who also blocks yt-dl and other similar tools. Edit: I was wrong.
- oefrha 4y agoUh, what? youtube-dl.org is the first result for youtube-dl on Google, followed by GitHub repo, ytdl-org.github.io, Wikipedia, etc. TPB is the first result too. IIRC at one point searching for TPB only returned proxy sites, but that doesn’t appear to be the case now.
- bqmjjx0kac 4y agoAny source on that? I just searched both "youtube-dl" and "pirate bay" and got reasonable-looking results.
- ttybird2 4y agoYou don't get "reasonable-looking" results for "pirate bay" on google.
- 4y ago
- fortran77 4y agoI wonder if it was unintentional. They rely on Bing's database for their search engine; if these sites disappeared from their data source, might it have disappeared from DDG without any direct intention?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mlindner 4y agoIs there a search alternative that isn't just using Google or Bing underneath? DDG is just Bing and all the recent filtering and what not that Bing has been doing also applies to DDG. Many things that used to show up on DDG no longer do.
- freediver 4y agoThere are plenty - Kagi, Brave, Mojeek, Yandex, Rightdao, Gigablast...
- vvf1 4y ago
- mlindner 4y agoDoesn't Brave also use Bing underneath?
- xigoi 4y agoIf their about page isn't lying, about 90% of their results are original.
- schmorptron 4y agoThey bought the cliqz team and their work / tech when that died, so I'd assume they're using what those people had been building.
- sylware 4y agoI guess we need an up-to-date wikipedia page about all those alternatives.
- DanHulton 4y agoBeen using Kagi for the last week and the search results have been SURPRISINGLY good. Like, in the "I don't have to scroll to find it" category of good, and no having to deal with spam sites that just copy the actual answer but somehow rank higher than the original, like currently plagues Google.
- ok123456 4y agoI'm probably going to stop using DDG now. I don't want my results filtered in anyway because of pearl clutching over 'piracy' or whatever.
- mysterydip 4y agoWhat are you going to use instead?
- ok123456 4y agoyandex
- CharlesW 4y agoYandex is the worst alternative you could pick. https://www.protocol.com/policy/yandex-gershenzon-qa https://www.protocol.com/policy/yandex-gershenzon-qa
- tonguez 4y ago“…tech giant Yandex has a handshake deal with government authorities to limit what news outlets the site will pull onto its homepage” wow that sounds so incredibly different from the alternatives
- antattack 4y agoMakes one wonder, however, what other 'handshake deals' with autocratic government there are.
- ok123456 4y agoYeah. I'm sure Russia is the only place where the telecom, tech and news sectors have quid pro quos with the organs of state. [1] https://www.wired.com/2006/05/att-whistle-blowers-evidence/ https://www.wired.com/2006/05/att-whistle-blowers-evidence/
- nomilk 4y agoWhy does DDG de-list things in the first place; isn't it in the interest of search engines to be as useful as possible to users, and thus maximise the results provided? Also curious to know the extent to which Google de-lists things? Long term, perhaps a decentralised search engine could get around de-listing and provide a more reliable and rigorous search experience.
- notatoad 4y agoDDG uses the Bing index. If Bing de-lists something, then it disappears from DDG. Microsoft (and any other big company) has many competing interests other than just being helpful to users.
- nomilk 4y ago> [big companies have] many competing interests Are the main ones i) reducing competition and ii) managing their reputation? If so, the case for a decentralised search engine got stronger.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jbay808 4y agoI wonder how a decentralized search engine would fight its inevitable SEO war, should it become successful. I'd expect that all sites wanting to draw traffic would attempt to grab the reins of the search engine to point toward themselves, and the result would be search results ordered by rein-grabbing power. Not that centralized search engines are immune to this; they're almost as vulnerable (seeing as sponsored search results exist) but the maintainer at least has to balance that with the utility of the search engine overall, to prevent the search engine from falling out of favour. With a decentralized engine, parties that have deeply invested in manipulating the results will still want the engine to be popular too, but I'm not sure how you resolve the prisoners dilemma there as a whole.
- 4y ago
- yoyopa 4y agoif all you nerds stop talking about it maybe it will stay up
- rubyist5eva 4y agoSwitched to Brave Search - not looking back. I don't even care if the index sucks, it's been "good enough" and it has bangs.
- vvf1 4y ago
- mrtweetyhack 4y ago
- ZYinMD 4y agoWhat is DDG?
- racl101 4y agoDrop Dead Gorgeous or Duck Duck Go
- ddaalluu2 4y agoToo little too late. You're already dead for me.
- sonicggg 4y agoDDL is a fringe search engine. They are not doing themselves any good by crippling their search results. It's just going to push the 10 people still using their stuff away.
- IAmGraydon 4y agoSo long, DDG. Censorship before they even gained enough momentum to get users to stick will undoubtedly be the beginning of the end for them. Looking forward to the next Google competitor. Eventually, someone will get it right.
- krick 4y agoThey are not back, it's misleading bullshit. "Pirate bay" was never hidden from search in that sense. Look for "<something> torrent" that is found on thepiratebay by Brave (I guess I won't provide the exact search term I tested, sorry). Now try to look for it on DDG. You'll find many torrent sites, but not thepiratebay.org