Yeah, that was clearly just the group having fun, sounds like it might have been some kind of in-joke. Stuff like keygen music and adding extra fun stuff to your cracks has always been part of the culture. For the most part, while I’m not saying there is zero risk, but as long as it’s from verified groups with good reputation, your pirated software will be safe to use - also part of the culture.

I ran an instance for a while out of curiosity a few years back - building the database seemed to work fine and appeared like a good idea, had a lot of fun to see the connections with other servers and my crawler filling holes of unknown spaces. But I think the search algorithm itself was (most likely is) not sophisticated enough, it just did not give relevant results often enough, and it was extremely vulnerable to very simple SEO tactics to push trash to the top.

Ah, sad, thank you for researching! Here’s hoping it will come back in some form.

I was, and am, skeptical, but I also must admit, the potential breakthrough is teasing my psyche with that feeling of just wanting it to be real. A part of me hopes that maybe it will still end up confirmed by other peers, but, granted, it was a low chance even when the news first came out.

“Journalists”