An open source, decentralized search engine allowing private and censorship-resistant web searching through peer-to-peer network indexing
YaCy is a free search engine that anyone can use to build a search portal for their intranet or to help search the public internet. When contributing to the world-wide peer network, the scale of YaCy is limited only by the number of users in the world and can index billions of web pages. It is fully decentralized, all users of the search engine network are equal, the network does not store user search requests and it is not possible for anyone to censor the content of the shared index. We want to achieve freedom of information through a free, distributed web search which is powered by the world's users.
The YAcy P2P network crawls the web and indexes metadata and fulltext content. It operates decentralized, all nodes of the network are equal. There are no central servers. Every search peer can stand alone without needing other network nodes. The indexing and search facilities provided by YaCy are better than most dedicated search engines. The peer-to-peer approach has some unique advantages: It is censorship-resistant, there are no central servers that could be required to censor search results, it scales well with heavy load because it leverages the computing power and bandwidth of many nodes, and it provides transparent and reproducible results because its code and indexed data are open.
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