I searched torrent sites on DDG just to test what you are saying and this isn't true or maybe I am not understanding but it shows me torrent sites links so I am not aware what you might be talking about.
Interestingly, I did find that DDG isn't scrubbing Russian torrent sites from it's results. I think this makes sense if DDG is trying to compete with Yandex (who doesn't censor like DDG).
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site:uztracker.net
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site:rutracker.org
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site:piratesparadise.org (eng, hosted in Moldova)
To be fair, 1337x.tw is a fake 1337x domain [1, 2]. It's bad that it's even indexed by DDG higher than the official one, I think it would be better if it was completely hidden from results. The .tw is a malicious website that actively tries to mislead users. For example, on the main page it says "1337x.to is our main domain", but when you click on that, you get redirected to "1377x.to" (notice the swapped digit), yet another fake clone website that conveniently lists the .tw as one of the official mirrors.
Searching for site:1337x.to, which is the official domain, does give results.
I had just searched 1337x and nothing too much else so it seems that duckduckgo may (sensor?) the site:1337x.tw or similar but also I feel like ddg doesnt really censor the ability to find the website by just searchign 1337x
Although I still agree that this is interesting discovery but I didnt know that these sites allowed to be indexed in the first place and that the issue was from ddg site, I always thought it was the opposite or didnt really give much too thought into it but interesting, I would love to discuss more about why you might think so this is the case or how it can meaningfully impact I suppose.
I think that the issue here could be that there might be some censorship from big upstream or that ddg does it to prevent any legal issues which I am sure can open a load ton of questions if you scrape something tangentially related to copyright/similar so it might be understandable why they might do this I suppose.
