Harmful for whom? For common folks, who are trying to download a movie but get a virus instead - yes, very harmful. For the parties who have a say about the situation - not really: Google/Bing/DDG lose nothing (given that all search engines behave the same), "copyright holders" win.
This is a part of the effort to decrease visibility of piracy and to drive to the "freak" zone: "piracy is illegal and dangerous, so better go watch some Netflix, kids!".
And it has been successful so far: how many teenagers you know who pirate stuff? A few generations ago it was normal, but now it isn't.
I think the lesser popularity of piracy with the younger generations is somewhat less about intentional takedown-based anti-piracy efforts and more their preference for mobile devices and the "pirate" options failing to keep up while the legal streaming services are worlds better than they were 10 years ago. Apple not allowing torrent clients on the app store definitely helped, though. That comes back to the broader narrative of the war on general-purpose computers: perhaps the most effective anti-piracy effort of all has been selling people devices that run crippled OSes like iOS and Android instead of Windows.
This is a part of the effort to decrease visibility of piracy and to drive to the "freak" zone: "piracy is illegal and dangerous, so better go watch some Netflix, kids!".
And it has been successful so far: how many teenagers you know who pirate stuff? A few generations ago it was normal, but now it isn't.