Yacy

What is YaCy?

YaCy is a full search engine application containing a server hosting a search index, a web application to provide a nice user front-end for searches and index creation and a production-ready web crawler with a scheduler to keep a search index fresh.

YaCy search portals can also be placed in an intranet environment, making it a replacement for commercial enterprise search solutions. A network scanner makes it easy to discover all available HTTP, FTP and SMB servers.

Running a personal Search Engine is a great tool for privacy; indeed YaCy was created with the privacy aspect as priority motivation for the project.

You can also use YaCy with a customized search page in your own web applications.

Large-Scale Web Search with a Peer-to-Peer Network

Each YaCy peer can be part of a large search network where search indexes can be exchanged with other YaCy installation over a built-in peer-to-peer network protocol.

This is the default operation that enables new users to instantly access a large-scale search cluster, operated only by YaCy users.

You can opt-out from the YaCy cluster operation by choosing a different operation mode in the web interface. You can also opt-out from the network in individual searches, turning the use of YaCy a completely privacy-aware tool - in this operation mode search results are computed from the local index only.

Installation

We recommend to compile YaCy yourself and install it from the git sources. Pre-compiled YaCy packages exist but are not generated on a regular basis. Automaticaly built latest developer release is available at release.yacy.net. To get a ready-to-run production package, run YaCy from Docker.

Compile and run YaCy from git sources

You need Java 11 or later to run YaCy and ant to build YaCy. This would install the requirements