Yacy: a decentralized internet search engine based on p2p

yacy is a free search engine that uses a p2p network as infrastructure. Just like the well-known Emule or Ares clients do for file sharing, but YaCy takes care of Internet searches.There is no central control server. Instead, all participants are equal. Any node on the multilingual network can index the network and be a search robot. You can also index the user's navigation that records the pages visited (of course, pages that may contain private information such as forms or pages in the https protocol are not indexed).

The idea is that you navigate using special software. While browsing it is indexing and exchanging pages with the indexes of other users of the YaCy p2p network. When searching you can use your own local search engine to get results.

The technical difficulties seem already overcome, but it still does not give very good results, because it needs a critical mass to start being interesting. When it reaches critical mass it can be a search engine alternative to large commercial centralized search engines.

As it is a p2p network without control, and there is no central node, search results cannot be censored, and reliability is assured (at least theoretically). The search engine is not owned by any company, there is no advertising or manipulated ranking.

The program is free software under the GPL license.