Bing’s index no longer returns results from large public trackers known for connecting visitors to torrent swarms that share copyrighted material without the rightsholder’s permission, even when using the site: operator to ask for webpages directly. This is in line with Google voluntarily demoting and purging domains believed to contain similar content from their index, in a dramatic shift from their stance against internet censorship years ago.
As a result, many search engines that rely on Bing’s results such as Duckduckgo also fail to return these results. I found Ecosia listed more results than both Bing and DDG, however.
Microsoft suggests this is a technical issue, however, and not intentional.
One troubling result of this is malicious copycat sites are returned instead:
That brings us to another side-effect of the disappearing sites. With the disappearance of the official domains, copycats are now making their way to the top results. These are generally more likely to show malicious advertisements or cause other trouble.
This copycat problem equally applies to Google, where demoted or removed sites are regularly replaced by dubious sites.
