YaCy Web Search Engine

YaCy is a scalable personal web crawler and web search engine. One YaCy installation can store more than 10 million documents,but in a community of search peers YaCy can provide a search index of unlimited size.

Your own search portal!

• Find information on the web that other search portals hide.


• Hide your search requests, prevent that anyone can log your search queries in clear text. Privacy is important.


• Join a community of independent YaCy users, share your web index and use the distributed search network for a uncensored, user-driven web search.

Why should you use YaCy as your search engine?

• You can run your own web search poral, either only for yourself or as public search portal in the internet


• Provide a search function for your own web pages or your intranet.


• Nobody else than you can censor your web search, because there is no central server that could apply a global filter.


• Search results are better if you define your own search domain, and search within that domain. With YaCy you can feed in the domains that host expert information for your search. Example: try a demo-search:
  
   
  This search is performed on a 16-peer cluster at Liebel-Lab in the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. The demo knows about 30 million pages from mostly scientific domains.


• Security: if you search for the purpose of product development and innovation, you give away information about your secret company knowledge by putting in words about such details in a search form that points to a central search service. To maintain your business secrets, you need your own search engine which can easily be created with yacy as the example above shows.

Its easy!

Installation of YaCy takes only three minutes! Just download, decompress, start. Everything you need is included, no set-up of web servers, databases or anything else. No command-line interface, all administration tasks are done in a web front-end that is included in YaCy.

Decentralized Architecture

This is the public network that you can join to use and support a large-scale free and uncensored search: 

YaCy has a peer-to-peer web index exchange interface and it does not need a central server.

Web searches are anonymized. No central log of your searches exist. Web crawls can be done collaborative with all other YaCy peers. Resulting indexes are organized in a distributed hash table.

Multimedia

YaCy can not only index texts from various file formats but also from different media contents. A search result shows interesting text, image, audio and video content with direct links to OGG, MP3, and video files.