YaCy – Decentralized Web Search
Has anyone seen this?
From the homepage:
YaCy is a free search engine that anyone can use to build a search portal for their intranet or to help search the public internet. When contributing to the world-wide peer network, the scale of YaCy is limited only by the number of users in the world and can index billions of web pages. It is fully decentralized, all users of the search engine network are equal, the network does not store user search requests and it is not possible for anyone to censor the content of the shared index. We want to achieve freedom of information through a free, distributed web search which is powered by the world’s users.
Limited demo interface: http://search.yacy.net/
Interesting idea.
It would be more interesting if it used a language that permitted dynamic updating of software while it is running. Otherwise, you are going to have the YaCy search engine you installed and nothing more.
Reportedly Google improves its search algorithm many times every quarter. How many of those changes are ad-driven they don’t say.
The documentation for YaCy is slim at best. Particularly on technical details. For example, uses a NoSQL database. OK, a custom one or one of the standard ones? I could go on but it would not produce any answers. As I explore the software I will post what I find out about it.