DuckduckGo has proven itself to be a privacy-centered search engine. The company has completely excluded the search results for many pirate sites including FMovies, The Pirate Bay and 1337x. The search engine also remove several video downloading tools like Youtube-DL including the homepage of the open-source software youtube-mp3 is unfindable.
The removal of those pirate sites and YouTube D-L sites are due to the inability of DuckduckGo not immune to potential copyright issues.
We operate globally, as do bangs, and products that actively facilitate interaction with illegal content can have us and our employees face significant legal liability, and jeopardizing the entire service.
-DuckDuckGo Bang's Tagawa Explained.
This was first became apparent in 2018 when the search engine removed several search shortcut for pirate sites. These bangs were seen to avoid liability.
DuckDuckGo has ended up removing roughly 2,000 search results for major popular pirate sites including 1337x, RARBG, The Pirate Bay, Fmovie etc.
Now it you search the engine for Pirate Bay (site:thepiratebay.org), instead of it to return all results from DuckduckGo indexed for pirate Bay main domain, it shows nothing.
The same result is shown when you search for YouTube D-L (site:youtube-dl.org) on DuckduckGo search engine.
Most popular search engines including Google and Microsoft are already removing piracy-related results. A move like this could protect DuckDuckGo against costly copyright battles.