Pirate sites are getting harder to find on search engines. Google has taken a number of steps to demote or remove problem domains, and it doesn't seem to be alone. Several of the most visited pirate sites have virtually no results on Bing either. According to the search engine, this is not the result of an 'editorial decision'.
Over the past few months, we have repeatedly reported on Google's decision to voluntarily remove pirate sites of your search results.
Google will do this if local court orders require ISPs to block access to the sites. These measures are geographically targeted to the applicable countries, which include the United Kingdom, France, and the Netherlands.
So far, Google has not publicly commented on its motivation, but several rights holders have confirmed the actions. Interestingly, however, Google is not the only search engine where pirate sites have "disappeared." In fact, it is a persistent problem on other search engines as well.
Bing Lost Pirate Sites
This week we ran several tests on the Bing search engine in several countries. This revealed that several of the top pirate sites only have their home pages indexed, while others are completely unfindable.
For example, when we use the site: command to find all pirate bay pages indexed by Bing there is only one visible result. A message at the bottom clarifies that "some results have been removed", but that's an understatement, since there are supposed to be millions.
For comparison, the same Google search claims to return ~24,000 URLs from The Pirate Bay, provided that the site has not been completely removed due to the aforementioned voluntary removal process.
The problem is also apparent when searching for "Pirate Bay Linux". on bing this does not return any useful results from The Pirate Bay, while Google lists a collection of relevant pages from the notorious torrent site.
This is not to say that Google is better than Bing, we just want to show the differences. Depending on the search term and its location, the Microsoft search engine may provide better results for other search terms.
Bing's sparse search results aren't limited to The Pirate Bay. The same applies to various other torrent sites like Fitgirl-Repacks.site and TorrentGalaxy.to. Also, other pirate portals, including 9anime.to, return the same result.
Entire Domains Disappear
The domains mentioned above still have their home pages listed, but the same cannot be said for many others.
When we search 1337x.to no results (for that domain) at all, even though Bing opens the correct Wikipedia page in an info panel. Similarly, results are missing for Fmovies.to, Rarbg.to, and other popular sites.
For the record, these results are the same across the various geographic locations we tested.
And there is more to this mystery, as other prominent pirate sites remain indexed as usual. This includes the most popular torrent site YTS.mx which, apart from some DMCA takedowns, has numerous pages in Bing search results.
'No editorial decision'
So what is going on here? Is this a measure against piracy? Or are these domains being punished for another reason?
When we contacted Microsoft, the company could not immediately provide an explanation. However, the team emphasized that the removals are not the result of an editorial decision.
โWe can share that we did not make an editorial decision to remove these domains. We have passed it on to our technical team," a spokesperson told us.
Whatever the reason, moves are not without consequences. Several other search engines that rely on Bing data don't get the same results. This includes the privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo.
Collateral damage
Last year we reported an issue with pirate sites disappearing on DuckDuckgo. this was also related to bing. Although DuckDuckGo manually returned some links, these issues persist.
When we search for "rarbg" in DuckDuckGo, Rarbg.to is correctly identified as the official site and the top result.
This result is only triggered by certain keywords. When we search for "rarbg official site", RarBG is nowhere to be found. Instead, we get the same results like we do on Bing.
That brings us to another side effect of disappearing sites. With official domains gone, imitators are now making their way to the top results. Usually, they are more likely to display malicious ads or cause other problems.
This copycat problem applies equally to Google, where demoted or removed sites are regularly replaced with dubious sites.
