It offered a wide variety of content and over the past thirteen years it grew out to become one of the largest sites of its kind. This week, however, Alluc surprised friend and foe by shutting down.
“The alluc search engine has been discontinued. After 13 years of alluc, we decided to take a break and focus on other projects,” a message posted on the site’s homepage reads.
That the site was popular is not a secret. People used it to find streaming links to nearly everything, from old movies to the latest hit series. The operators mention that they served a billion unique visitors over the past decade, which is an incredible achievement.
What’s less clear, however, is why the site decided to stop now. In the past, we’ve reported on similar sites that threw in the towel because revenue was dwindling, but Alluc told us that is not the case here.
“The decision was not driven by monetary reasons. We started alluc when we were still in high-school and it became into something bigger and better than we could have ever imagined when we started it,” Alluc’s Sebastian tells us.
“But now it’s time for us to move on. We hope to have contributed a lot to the video space and to have helped out a lot of people during these 13 years of running alluc full time.”
While Alluc could be used to find both authorized and unauthorized content, the movie industry saw it as a blatant pirate site. This resulted in a site blocking request in Australia, among other things.
Alluc, however, always rejected the ‘pirate’ label and saw itself as an “uncensored” search engine. While they are shutting down now, they still see a future for similar services.
“There will always be a future for uncensored search and I hope us shutting down alluc can help to create the vacuum needed to incentivize new sites of similar quality and scope or even a decentralized solution to be created by others,” Sebastian tells us.
Time will tell whether another site will indeed jump in to fill the gap.
Alluc’s API, which is used by third-party apps and services to find streaming links, will remain available until the end of the month when it will shut down. Meanwhile, Alluc’s search engine framework lives on at pron.tv, an adult-themed site.
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