Free Software Search Engine

YaCy is a free software search engine software that everyone can use to build a search portal for the intranet or the internet. YaCy can be operated as Search Appliance but YaCy can also operate as a peer in a peer-to-peer search engine network. Such a network can scale with the number of users to index billions of web pages. It is fully decentralized, all users of the search engine network are equal in administration rights and the network does not store user search requests and it is also not possibly for anyone to censor the content of the shared index. We want to achieve freedom of information through a free distributed search software.

Decentralization

Imagine it could be possible to clone the proprietary software of a large professional search engine operator and run this software on many private computers at home. With YaCy we try to develop such a software and run it on the computers of users and supporters. The resulting decentralized web search currently has about 1.4 billion documents in its index and more than 600 peer-operators contribute each month. About 130,000 search queries are computed with this network each day.

Live image of the 'freeworld' network

There are already several such search networks based on YaCy. The two major networks are the 'freeworld' network (which you may join in easily when you load the standard installation of YaCy) and the Sciencenet of the Karlsruhe Institut of Technology with a search about scientific content. More networks exist as TOR hidden service and as special search in WiFi networks

Installation is easy!

The installation takes only three minutes. You don't need additional software (more than a java virtual machine). Just download the release, decompress the pachacke and run the start script. Then the search index of the freeworld search network can instantly be used on your own computer. You don't need to install external databases or a web server, everything is already included in YaCy.