
YaCy: a free distributed search engine - e19293001
http://yacy.net/en/index.html
======
bobajeff
Peer-to-peer Information Retrieval is one of those old research topics that
face the difficult to solve problem of scalability.

YaCy is yet an early contributor to this research but we've yet to make
something to my knowledge that gives comparable results to centralised search
engines, is fast and scales well.

~~~
fiatjaf
Any search engine is good enough, but no one, centralized or decentralized, is
even close to Google.

Google is our wonder and our curse.

~~~
eggie
I actually think that the duck (ddg.gg) is better. I now find it difficult to
use google, which feels clunky and capricious. I make thousands of queries a
day for work, so I really can't excuse poor performance.

For a while I would switch back to google when my searches failed and I wanted
to check if the duck was getting me equivalent or better answers. In the past
year and a half I've completely stopped. It is simply a high-quality product
that exceeds google in what it offers.

Maybe you'll respond that "it just doesn't 'feel' high quality". OK, I can't
argue with that because it's your opinion... but as long as we collectively
decide to believe this fantasy we will continue to be locked into the search
juggernaut. You can help improve the diversity of options by using something
different _and_ get to use a better product.

The only thing that I can't do on the duck is search academic papers. Google
scholar is still the best thing of its type.

~~~
Mithaldu
The problem is, DDG is not a search _engine_. It is a UI on top of other
search _engines_.

(Yes, you may say it has DuckDuckBot, but ask around people who run websites
if they've ever seen a hit from it.)

~~~
johnnydoebk
It's not a search engine. But the search engines it is based on provide
surprisingly good results. So, I would be careful with the statement that
"other search engines are not even close to Google".

I think that's just a matter of habits. Initially, it feels a bit unusual and
maybe even uncomfortable to use not the search engine you've got used to. But
after some time you understand that now Google is the one that is
uncomfortable for you.

~~~
Mithaldu
Did you reply to the wrong person?

------
singularity2001
"Your peer cannot accept remote crawls because you need senior or principal
peer status for that!"

So the average user cannot contribute to building the crawl index?

~~~
executesorder66
That is just the default setting, to prevent using massive bandwidth. You can
change the setting to allow for that.

~~~
singularity2001
couldn't find it

~~~
executesorder66
Sorry, I hadn't used it in a while. You need to open up the port. See here:

[http://www.yacy-
websearch.net/wiki/index.php/En:FAQ#My_peer_...](http://www.yacy-
websearch.net/wiki/index.php/En:FAQ#My_peer_says_it_runs_in_.27Junior_Mode.27._How_can_I_run_it_in_Senior_Mode.3F)

------
jacquesm
This has been posted to HN many times before, this was the most active thread:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8746883](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8746883)

~~~
r721
It looks like there was a big update recently:

[http://yacy.net/release_notes/YaCy_Release_1_90.html](http://yacy.net/release_notes/YaCy_Release_1_90.html)
(Jul 2016)

------
steaminghacker
Wow! I had the same idea over 10 years ago. I'm glad it's being done.

My idea was using a giant P2P indexbase. However, I read the tech page, but it
doesn't explain enough. For example, for this to work, there would have to be
some kind of "information routing" whereby queries within certain information
domains would be routed to machines. I can't see how this is being done.

Because you can't have the whole index on each machine, therefore, how does it
know where to route a given query?

Additionally, peer nodes would have to crawl to a certain criteria; either
subject based, or perhaps geographically. Otherwise you'd just end up with the
same stuff everywhere.

If there's some more explanation, please link.

thanks.

------
singularity2001
search "learning to learn gradient descent by gradient descent"

The following words are stop-words and had been excluded from the search: [by,
to].

Results: 1) Linux-Kernel Archive: By Thread 2) Series Cinematography by 3) Key
to Citations

As they are bold, "by" and "to" seem to get boosted!!

------
CaptSpify
So, has anyone used it? If so, how is it?

The last time I looked at this (long, long ago), it was pretty much poisoned
by penis-enlargement and drug ads.

I'm hoping it's gotten better since then.

------
ShirsenduK
This page took 25GB of RAM on Safari!

