I’ll be traking this search engine for when my Kagi sub is up.
Yacy p2p search engine. Run global p2p, Intranet p2p or local only. Crawl the web yourself. Customizations.
Filtering.
Ranking.
etc.Decent alternative, although probably most non-technical people won’t bother, let’s be honest. Does it work well for you? I don’t quite understand the bigger picture of how it operates.
So I only use it locally on my Raspberry Pi and access it from the network. Accordingly, the results only include what I crawl (these are recrawled after a specified time to keep them up to date in case content changes, is removed, or is added on the actual websites). You can configure how deeply it should crawl and whether it should include links to other websites, etc. I’ve just set a shallow crawl depth of, I think, 3 or so. But I also search regularly with DDG to find other websites that I then add to the index for crawling. (This would be unnecessary for P2P operation.) That’s how I keep expanding it. You also have to set limits on the crawling; otherwise, it’ll use up all the network bandwidth if the computing power allows it. I don’t really use any of the customization, filtering, or ranking features, but I still took a look at what could be configured there—and there’s really a lot, so you can completely tailor the search engine to your own needs. It’s a little unfortunate that it’s based on Java
Here is a list of public Yacy instances that anyone can use: https://yacy.space/ ( ofc this works just p2p because someone else is hosting)
Fascinating. So why you don’t use the P2P network and instead only have a local one?
Data protection and privacy are important to me. (Here comes the joke.) Since I haven’t had a VPN for a while (I need to sign up for one again, but I’m such an idiot—I always put it off and only think about it when I’m short on cash. xD) and I haven’t set up DynDNS either, I only use Yacy locally.
Back then, I was running it on a Raspberry Pi 3B (now a Raspberry Pi 5) and hosting it via P2P. But I also had a VPN and so on.
So far, I’ve been a bit too lazy to set up Yacy completely on the PI 5. I’ll be honest—since the settings are really powerful, it can take quite a while to get everything set up. 😅🤣I see. I suppose when you connect to the P2P network people can see your IP and some metadata of the queries you make?