YaCy

YaCy

YaCy is an open source, decentralized search engine that allows users to search the web in a private and censorship-resistant way. It forms a peer-to-peer network where each node indexes a portion of the web using a crawling algorithm.
YaCy image
open-source decentralized peertopeer search-engine private censorshipresistant

YaCy: Open Source, Decentralized Search Engine

An open source, decentralized search engine allowing private and censorship-resistant web searching through peer-to-peer network indexing

What is YaCy?

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.

YaCy Features

Features

  1. Decentralized peer-to-peer architecture
  2. Open source and free
  3. User privacy and anonymity
  4. Censorship resistance
  5. Web crawling and indexing
  6. Customizable search options
  7. Access to hidden web resources
  8. Volunteer computing model

Pricing

  • Open Source

Pros

No central authority or single point of failure

User data is not collected or monetized

Harder for governments to censor results

Can access content on hidden web not indexed by major search engines

Users can contribute spare computing resources to help index web

Cons

Smaller index size than mainstream search engines

Slower performance than centralized alternatives

Requires more technical knowledge to operate a node

Results can be lower quality without central oversight

Limited adoption so far


The Best YaCy Alternatives

Top Network & Admin and Decentralized Search and other similar apps like YaCy


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