Search Engine Technology

YaCy is a complete search appliance with user interface, index, administration and monitoring. The following diagram shows its components:

YaCy harvests web pages with a web crawler. Documents are then parsed, indexed and the search index is stored locally. If your peer is part a peer network, then your local search index is also merged into the shared index for that network. If a search is started then the local index contributes together with a global search index from peers in the YaCy search network.

Peer-to-Peer Networking

YaCy peers continuously exchange index fragments using a Distributed Hash Table. Index data can therefore reach the local peer even before a user query is submitted, but of course it is still loaded from the remote peer network too when needed.

Components

YaCy consists of a variety of components that serve the networking, administration and maintenance of the index with blacklists, moderation functions and community communication. The following graph shows components in YaCy: