Despite its decline in popularity, The Pirate Bay continues to face extensive censorship, making it difficult to find through search engines like Yandex. While the reasons behind this censorship are unclear, other widely-used pirate sites remain readily accessible in search results.
The relationship between The Pirate Bay and search engines has been strained recently, with platforms like Google removing thepiratebay.org from search results in countries where ISPs block the site.
This deindexing trend extends beyond Google, as Bing has also limited Pirate Bay URLs in its index, leaving only the main homepage accessible. Consequently, DuckDuckGo and other search engines powered by Microsoft followed suit.
While there are still some lesser-known search engines capable of finding Pirate Bay links, including non-infringing ones, Russia’s Yandex is notably absent from that list.
Established in 1997, Yandex is among the oldest search engines online, with significant popularity in Russia, where it dominates the market. Russian regulations mandate search engines, including foreign ones, to remove results associated with pirate sites. While this policy typically doesn’t extend globally, The Pirate Bay’s official domain appears to have vanished from Yandex search results.
A basic search for “The Pirate Bay” on Yandex yields results linking to proxies, the Wikipedia page, and other related entries, but the official thepiratebay.org domain is notably absent.
It’s true that locating the official domain isn’t difficult, as it’s often mentioned on related Wikipedia pages. However, conducting a ‘site:’ search, which usually lists all pages from a specified domain name, returns no results at all in our tests. This absence suggests that Yandex has indeed removed The Pirate Bay’s official domain from its index.
It’s intriguing that other pirate sites still appear in search results using the same site-specific command, while The Pirate Bay seems to be singled out. However, after completing this article, we observed that the site: search began to show some results for thepiratebay.org again, although it still didn’t feature prominently in the top results for “The Pirate Bay.” It’s possible that Yandex made some changes, and the outcome may vary depending on users’ locations.
As for why Yandex made this decision, it remains unknown. We reached out to the company for comment but have yet to receive a response.
At this stage, The Pirate Bay might not be overly concerned about yet another attempt to block it. The site has weathered similar measures in the past, and although its traffic may have been affected, many loyal users continue to find their way to it.
