Pirate sites are increasingly difficult to find on search engines and Google has taken a series of steps to remove or at least give less importance to problematic domains and it seems not to be alone. In fact, several of the most visited pirate sites also have virtually no results on Bing. However, according to the search engine, this is not the result of an “editorial decision”.
Pirate sites at risk? After Google run away from Bing!
It is not known for sure what is happening on Bing. However, in Google’s case, it’s all done on purpose. This is because recently the search engine giant took the decision to completely de-index websites from the results.
The case of Bing
The Torrent Freak website did several tests on the Bing search engine in several countries. In this exercise it was noticed that several of the main pirate sites have their pages indexed. Others appear near the end of the results.
For example, when they used the command site: to find all pages of the Pirate Bay indexed by Bing, there was only one visible result. A message at the end clarifies that “some results have been removed”. However, there were still supposed to be millions.
For comparison, the same Google search still returns about 24,000 URLs from The Pirate Bay. This at least for now.
The problem is also evident when searching for “Pirate Bay Linux”. On Bing this does not return any results. Google lists a collection of relevant pages from this torrent site.
But Bing’s meager search results aren’t limited to The Pirate Bay. The same applies to several other torrent sites such as Fitgirl-Repacks and TorrentGalaxy. Also, so do other pirates, including 9anime.
A decision that was not editorial
The TorrentFreak website contacted Microsoft and at the time the company did not immediately give an explanation. However, they later noted that the removals were not the result of an editorial decision. Be that as it may, there are side situations to point out.
It’s just that some sites like DuckDuckgo rely on data from Bing. That said, anything removed from Bing also disappears from other search engines that use the same results.
However, those who are taking advantage of this are fake sites created with similar names that are rising to the top. The point is that they are not exactly distributing piracy but are infecting users.
