Yacy - Distributed Uncensored Search Engine: Three Years Later

Yacy is a decentralized search engine that allows you to search for information on the Internet without local or global censorship or any other restrictions.

The first and only mention of him on Habré was November 29, 2011.
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But since that time, much has changed, let's look at it again.

Key features and benefits of Yacy:

- Decentralized index search and storage - on the DHT network
- Three modes of operation: 1) Global Search Index, 2) Group Index, 3) Local Index
- Lack of advertising
- The absence of any censorship (state, copyright)
- A huge number of settings

The main disadvantages are:

- Search time (due to decentralized nature, searching for unpopular content can take considerable time)
- Relevance (the relevance algorithm has been reworked over these three years, but it still lags behind the search giants)

What has changed in three years?

- Support for Russian-language searches
- Hints appeared in while entering a search query
- Advanced Search - while you type yacy is already looking for peers with this content
- Improved search and issue algorithms - more relevant result
and millions of other minor changes under the hood.

How does Yacy work?

Indexing

Indexing can be initiated in the following ways:
1) Forced indication to start scanning
2) Remote request from another peer
3) Setting up proxying of all requests from the browser to Yacy with the subsequent indexation of what you read

After compiling the index base, it is stored locally, sending information to the network that you have it, and is distributed via DHT to neighboring peers.

Search

During the search process, Yacy first searches for results in a local index, and then in a global one, contacting DHT with peers that have information about the index of a particular query / site.

Yacy search results:





Official site of the project yacy.net/en
Windows yacy.net/release/yacy_v1.68_20140209_9000.exe
Linux yacy.net/release/yacy_v1.68_20140209_9000.tar.gz
OS X yacy.net/release/yacy_v1.68_20140209_9000.dmg

Test search page search.yacy.net (which can fall from a lot of traffic)

PS The last article was three years ago, if habr users will be interested in the topic of decentralized search engines, I am ready to review the entire functionality of Yacy and to consider in detail how it works