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28 November 2011, 18:48

Version 1.0 of YaCy distributed search engine released

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Zoom Diagram of sciencenet, a YaCy-based search engine

After more than 5 years of development, the YaCy developers have released version 1.0 of their open source, decentralised search engine. The GPL-licensed YaCy peer-to-peer search engine is designed as an alternative to search services, such as those provided Google, that are centrally managed by one company.

Like file sharing peers, all search engine peers will contribute search results and use the results contributed by others. An important advantage, say the developers, is that YaCy content cannot be censored. Karsten Gerloff, President of the Free Software Foundation Europe described the project as a "vital building block" for the "future world of distributed, peer-to-peer systems".

More than 600 peer operators are already contributing to YaCy-based centralised web searches. The search engine currently has approximately 1.4 billion documents in its index and it handles around 130,000 search requests per day. Several other search engine networks are also based on YaCy technology, for example, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology's sciencenet, which offers scientific content searches, uses YaCy. The project's Applications page provides several YaCy-based search installations in its sidebar.

The primary YaCy search portal, which allows anyone to test YaCy, appears to be struggling with the huge interest and is displaying the message "There is currently massive load on this page because of press releases today. A search might be not successful now".

Whether YaCy is used as a stand-alone installation – for example for local searches within a LAN – or as a contributor to one of the peer-to-peer installations, the developers emphasise that installation is very simple and will only take a few minutes. YaCy works under Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. The project is sponsored by the German SuMa-eV association for free knowledge access.

See also:

  • YaCy 1.0, German language release announcement.

(crve)

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