Yacy is a promising distributed search engine project. You can run Yacy as a P2P, peer to peer, search engine, or as your very own search engine with web crawler, or as an intranet, local search engine. However, this is not ready to be your primary search engine as there is something to the major search engines and their algorithms. But this is an interesting project to play around with and check back on over time. Maybe one day this will be good enough to replace the major search engines and your privacy search proxies. But since you can create your own custom web crawls, it can be an interesting tool for specific research projects now.
Decentralization
Imagine if, rather than relying on the proprietary software of a large professional search engine operator, your search engine was run by many private computers which aren’t under the control of any one company or individual.
Well, that’s what YaCy does!
To install your own instance of Yacy in docker:
docker run -d --name yacy_search_server -p 8090:8090 -p 8443:8443 -v yacy_search_server_data:/opt/yacy_search_server/DATA --restart unless-stopped --log-opt max-size=200m --log-opt max-file=2 yacy/yacy_search_server:latest
Once installed you can access by ip:8090.
The default login for the docker module is admin:yacy (change password after install). When you login you can go to the administration console.
And this will show that the results aren’t necessarily as good as the main search engines or privacy proxies.
If you want to improve the results, you can start your own web crawl.
I started a web crawl of docker.com and you can track the result and there is even a graphical display of its progress.
A scathing review of Yacy from 2021 showed that development was just starting back up, and that the project was in desperate need of Java programmers. Looking at the Yacy Github page there seems to only be a couple people actively contributing to the project.
We can only hope that this project captures the attention of some talented Java programmers and develops further. Consequently, distributed systems are the way of the future just like the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, with distributed mining around the world so no one government can shut it down or control it. So perhaps one day as Yacy’s development continues, it can be a replacement for the major search engines that have already shown their propensity for censoring content and using their platforms to manipulate people regarding elections and other societal changes. I’m reminded that Google had to remove their code of conduct statement “Don’t be evil” as they changed it to “Do the Right Thing”. Whose right thing? Because it’s certainly not THE right thing when I look through results on certain topics.