Where is the YaCy search portal?

The idea of YaCy is to have a distributed search without a centralised server and if there were a central Web portal, that could ruin the whole idea! However, people keep on asking for a 'demo' search portal or just something where it is possible to try YaCy without the installation of the YaCy peer.

A portal-like access to the YaCy network 'free world' (the default YaCy network for the WWW) should at least reflect the decentralized nature of the YaCy project. Every peer in the 'freeworld' network can in fact be used as a demo peer, but it might be possible the one selected peer does not work sufficiently enough as demo. There can be variuous reason for that, i.e. the peers user is doing a download meanwhile. A load balancer on demo peers would do best! Such a load balancer can now be accessed at:

Demo-Portal: http://search.yacy.de - a Load Balancer for YaCy Peers

Offering a demo portal for everyone is not useful for the YaCy if people are using only the search portal as search engine without contribution of a new peer. We therefore like to ask frequent users of the portal to install their own YaCy peer as access point for the global search. Operating your own search peer is the best option to use YaCy. All arguments for a decentralized search about privacy and censorship resistance will apply and your own peer offers probably the best search performance.

Architecture of the Load Balancers

The load balancer uses a list of YaCy peers, offered from their owner as portal peer.. Each new search on the demo portal is forwared to a limitited set of peers from the whole set of demo peers. The first answer from those peers is returned to the search user as search result. The search result page contains a hint about the demo peer which produced the result (shown at the bottom of the search results). This proves that the search actually is performed decentralized and not only within the demo portal.