Be your own Google with YaCy

A New search engine YaCy (pronounced as “ya see”) asks the common users to index web for each other in a move to weaken the mighty control of google.

They also want to bypass government controls by introducing peer to peer network structure for their search engine. This approach is adopted to loosen centralized network structure as adopted by google network data centers.

The project is supported by the Free Software Foundation Europe in a move to promote free and open source softwares.

YaCy asks its users to download the software and become the peers of each other so that they can search web without sending requests to the central server. YaCy hopes to match with Google (having 90% shares) if one in 1000 users become a part of their peer network, currently being 600 peers.

YaCy has an index of just 1.4 billion documents as compared to google which has more than 48 billion web pages in its index. It also emphasizes the security by encrypting all search queries and without being stored.The source code has been published for all to see the way YaCy ranks the websites. However Google’s algorithm for ranking is hidden from users.

“We are moving away from the idea that services need to be centrally controlled,” said Karsten Gerloff, president of the Free Software Foundation Europe.
Instead, we are realizing how important it is to be independent, and to create infrastructure that doesn't have a single point of failure."