Web Search By The People, For The People

Today, most information in the Internet is accessed through search engines, and it is increasingly important that search services remain uncensored.

Whilst major search portal providers are able to manipulate search results to reflect particular interests, 'YaCy' uses a peer-to-peer model to keep search results unrestricted.

YaCy is a free-software, open-source Web Search Engine by the people and for the people. We want to achieve freedom of information through a free, distributed web search technology which is powered by the world's users.

YaCy is the missing link between free/open content and the user. This link is currently filled mostly with the service of closed/proprietary and commercial search portal operators. When you use your own search engine, nobody can trace and store your search requests and nobody can censor the search results.

We demonstrate how everyone can set up a search service for web- and ftp-sites, make use of sitemaps and keep a search up-to-date with rss feeds. You will be able to do this yourself in just five minutes. We show how to evaluate the crawled data for statistics and web page link structures.

Developers may be interested in YaCys software architecture. We also show how APIs can be used for search retrieval, index import/data export and how to integrate a opensearch.org-compliant search service like YaCy into own web pages easily.