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YaCy

Open source

YaCy is a decentralized search engine with its own crawler and index that you can run privately, on an intranet or as part of a peer-to-peer network.

yacy.net
YaCy homepage screenshot
GitHub stars
4.1k
Last commit
9 days ago
Repository age
11 years
Licence
Custom
Self-hosted
Yes

About YaCy

YaCy is a complete search engine application: a server that hosts a search index, a web interface for searching and creating the index, and a production-ready crawler with a scheduler to keep the index fresh. It can run as a node in a distributed peer-to-peer network or as a private search portal.

YaCy search portals can also be placed inside an intranet, where the README says they can replace commercial enterprise search products, and a network scanner helps discover HTTP, FTP and SMB servers to index. The project was created with privacy as a primary motivation, and running a personal search engine avoids handing queries to a central provider. It is written in Java and tagged for decentralized search and privacy protection.

The repository license is shown as 'Other' on GitHub, reflecting the GPL family of licenses, so check the terms. YaCy is self-hosted on your own machine or server. It suits privacy-minded users, organizations that need intranet search and communities that want a decentralized alternative to commercial search.

Key features

  • Web crawler with scheduler
  • Peer-to-peer distributed search index
  • Web interface for search and indexing
  • Intranet search portal mode
  • Network scanner for HTTP, FTP and SMB
  • Designed with privacy as priority

Good fit for

  • →Private personal search engine
  • →Intranet search for organizations
  • →Decentralized web search
Built with
Java
Tags
search-engine
p2p
decentralized
privacy
intranet-search
web-crawler
java
self-hosted

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