For anyone here who uses SearXNG, I made a request to get YaCy added to list of indexable search engines, and they merged it in today!

YaCy is an independent search engine based off unique peer-to-peer decentralized webcrawling technology. Anyone can download a YaCy instance to host locally and contribute to the collective engine. You can also use it to index local intranets.

YaCy Homepage

YaCy official web search instance

😎 Smokey

2023-10-09 · 7 months ago · 👍 kelbot, norayr, xavi

5 Comments ↓

🎵 xavi · 2023-10-10 at 11:51:

I used to host a YaCy instance a few years ago, and unfortunately I was fairly disappointed with the project overall.

Most times, search queries would time out or return irrelevant results, so it was hardly usable. Also, presumably because of being a Java application, it consumed a great amount of resources on my server, making it unresponsive.

Apart from what seems like a subpar execution, I think YaCy attempts to solve a problem that is already very difficult to solve (i.e., a decentralised search engine). I hope similar projects appear in the future that provide a better solution.

Nonetheless, I find YaCy an interesting project, and I encourage its developers to keep improving it.

😎 Smokey [OP] · 2023-10-10 at 14:07:

@xavi When I share YaCy with people I make sure to note that its not a great engine for what most people want, which is instant relevant information in the first few clicks. This is because it has no SEO, instead relying on users manually rating the links they found relevant to the query with an upvote or downvote.

Instead I point to it as a novel use of technology and an example of what a truly free engine looks like.

I found similar struggles with self-hosting a YaCy instance, it just seemed to stop working after a while which needed a restart to get things working right again. Since you mention Java I wonder if its not a memory leak. This was a few years ago though, it may be better now.

🎵 xavi · 2023-10-10 at 19:28:

Of course, I would not expect the same convenience that big tech giants such as Bing, Qwant, DuckDuckGo or Google would offer, but unfortunately I could not find anything useful back when I used it, no matter how hard I tried. I hope that some project comes up with a truly free, decentralised search engine that finds a way to provide somewhat decent results. Then, I will be more than happy to switch.

My overall experience is that, similarly to PHP, Java applications are usually bloated compared to equivalent applications written in C, so it is no surprise YaCy has high system requirements. That said, I do not expect any decentralised search engine to be neither simple or lightweight, regardless the language.

🍭 jmjl · 2023-10-11 at 20:19:

If YaCy is added to a searXNG instance, it would be useless technically to YaCy's goals technically? As YaCy would get no feed positive or negative link ratings, which wouldn't help YaCy. Is that correct?

😎 Smokey [OP] · 2023-10-11 at 23:16:

sort of. It would be best if everyone set up their own yacy instance or used the official public one. users using searxng would not be able to affect ranking.

however searxng putting yacy in helps draw attention and get people started with using it. most people don't know it exist, or don't know the public instance exist (in part because their website links to the publoc instance status page indtead of the search home page which confuses new people). I believe its mutually beneficial yacy gets a chance to attract new users who wouldnt access it otherwise and searxng gets a new truely open search engine to aggregate in the case where instances don't want to use google or bing bases engines.