YaCy

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YaCy
REVIEW DATE : December 6, 2011 BOTTOM LINE: YaCy is a decentralized search tool that spares you from being profiled for advertisement and isn't subject to being censored, but it requires a little more effort that the big three search engines, is slower, and results aren't as complete. But that could change if more people use it. PROS: No ads or history tracking. Rank results. Search by document type. Use for your own site or intranet. CONS: Requires P2P software installation. Slow. No goodies such as image, video, maps, news. COMPANY: YaCy SPEC DATA: Type: Business, Personal, Professional Free: Yes, Yes OS Compatibility: Windows Vista, Windows XP, Linux, Mac OS, Windows 7 By Michael Muchmore Bing, Google, and Yahoo have sewn up the Web search game, right? Well that hasn't stopped newcomers from trying. Remember Cuil? Blekko? And there's a good chance you never heard of DuckDuckGo or IceRocket. Even celebrity MC Hammer is coming out with a Google competitor, wiredoo. But the flavor of the week, YaCy takes a different tack than all of these. Rather than simply having you type a query into a search box and enjoying results supplied by the engine, YaCy uses installed software through which anyone can contribute to the results, in a decentralized peer-to-peer, crowd-sourced take on Web search. The program also lets organizations build internal search for their sites or intranets. Finally, YaCy comes with none of the privacy or censorship concerns of Google or the rest, since it doesn't rely on one large company. In fact YaCy is more of a framework for peer-to-peer search services, though a demo "portal" lets the curious try out searching on one of the general Web search implementations, called freeworld. But YaCy's makers stress that just using the service without installing the peer-topeer service destroys the service's basic concept of decentralization. Users who install its software store a piece of the service's index. Signup and Setup YaCy's site claims that installation takes just three minutes, and in my case it actually took less than 2 minutes. Installer software is available for Windows, Mac, and GNU/Linux, each about 20MB in size. Luckily, after this quick installation, you don't have to do your searching in the program; everything is done in the browser, just as with any other search service. But this

background operation inevitably drains a bit of your system resources and Internet bandwidth. There is a Performance settings page, where YaCy's priority set set to "below normal" by default, but the interface for throttling down the service's bandwidth usage isn't straightforward. Interface A system tray icon is pretty much the extent of the installed program's interface. Doubleclicking this opens your default browser to a YaCy Web search box. Along the top of the webpage are tabs for Administration, Web Search, Search Network, Peer Owner Profile, and Help/Wiki. In the tradition of Google, the search interface is barebones: You just get a box under the P2P Web Search title, with the only options at this level being text or images. A "more options" link lets you tell YaCy how many results to display per page (10, 50, or 100), whether to use the P2P network or just a local index. This page also show some search tricks, like parameters to only show results with a specified phrase in the URL, from a specified site, by a certain author. You can also tell YaCy to sort results by date, nearness of search terms, and language. But doing a lot of this is simpler in Google. Options you won't find in that leader are to include Scroogle results (i.e., Google results scraped clean of ads and cookie tracking) or Blekko results. If you're fond of using your browser's built in search, YaCy suggests simply "click-open on the default search engine in the upper right search field of your browser and select Add YaCy Search. This worked fine in Firefox, Chrome, and Opera, but Internet Explorer needs a plugin to be created for its search provider site. YaCy's Administration tools are where you can choose whether you want to use it for regular Web search with Freeworld, for you own Web pages, or an intranet. You can also change your peer's name and port. To help the search service, you'll need to open a hole in your firewall, which the setup tries to do for you. Search Results YaCy at times delivers results far more slowly than Google—or pretty much any other Web search portal for that matter. On my very fast connection, some searches took up to seven seconds to fully populate a result page, compared with Google's instant view of results before I finished typing. And the results weren't nearly as complete. When I searched for an app called Appointment Plus, I got an odd set of results, including one from Wright State University and several from Blogger, not the actual software vendor's page. But most searches returned relevant page results. The more people who install YaCy, the better its results should get. YaCy can display a grid of square thumbnail image results if you chose the Images radio button, but images, video, maps, or page previews aren't shown on the result page the way they are in Bing and Google. When you hover the mouse over a result: Plus, Minus, and B icons lets you recommend, delete, or bookmark the individual result. There are also options to see metadata, and a "parser" link shows all the crawled text for the result page. But forget about Bing, Google, or Yahoo's ability to show you a cached page or preview of the page.

You can move to the next page of results by hitting the tab key, and a domain navigator shows up in a right panel below back and forward arrows and top term suggestions. There's also a Filetype Navigator, which lets you limit results to types like html, doc, zip, or pdf. Extras Of course, its newness and openness mean YaCy can't begin to compete with Bing, Google, or Yahoo in terms of extra goodies like maps, shopping help, images, video, weather, social, news, and so on. But if you're just searching for Web pages or on a specific topic or your own site, YaCy offers a solution. YaCy also offers some advanced tools not found in the popular search sites: You can harvest a site, or download all its pages, scan a network for servers, and compare results from any two from among 18 search engines. You can also add your own blacklist of sites you don't want results from. You also get some tools that pertain to your own P2P activity and some neato graphics showing the whole YaCy network's activity. I had contributed about 5000 of YaCy's 1.2 billion indexed pages! Searching for a Better Search It probably doesn't take Nostradamus to predict that YaCy isn't going to displace Google, or even Bing, any time soon. But it's a useful tool for those who don't mind donating a little bit of their bandwidth for a truly independent search service. It will also be useful to organizations that want a license-free way to provide search on their sites. The idea of an ad-free, tracking free, decentralized search service is really appealing, but I'm guessing most people won't want to go to the slight amount of effort required to install the YaCy client software. This is even more emphatically the case when you consider that the big three in search offer far more speed and features.

Summary
YaCy is a decentralized search tool that spares you from being profiled for advertisement and isn't subject to being censored, but it requires a little more effort that the big three search engines, is slower, and results aren't as complete. But that could change if more people use it.

Description
YaCy uses installed software through which anyone can contribute to the results, in a decentralized peer-to-peer, crowd-sourced take on Web search. The program also lets organizations build internal search for their sites or intranets. Finally, YaCy comes with none of the privacy or censorship concerns of Google or the rest, since it doesn't rely on one large company.

Tags: Blekko, Crowdsourcing, Cuil, DuckDuckGo, IceRocket, Scroogle, Yacy

Posted by Jason Robbins

Dec 07, 2011 09:54 am GMT Viewed 843 times

Author: PC Mag Source

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