{"slug": "yacy", "name": "YaCy", "category": "search", "category_name": "Search", "description": "", "recommenders": 5, "commenters": 8, "warners": 2, "score": 3.043, "rising": 1.02, "first": "2026-01-23", "latest": "2026-09-12", "why": "solutions like hister and yacy that is so privacy conscious", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 5, "neutral": 2, "compare": 0, "warn": 3}, "spark": [0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "solutions like hister and yacy that is so privacy conscious", "kind": "", "icon": true, "domain": "yacy.net", "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://yacy.net", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["YaCy"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 794710064, "item_id": 49669379, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49669379", "by": "orbital-decay", "date": "2026-09-12", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "https://yacy.net/", "excerpt": "https://yacy.net/", "context": "", "use_case": "Self-hosted web search", "switched_from": "", "story": "google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update"}, {"id": 790256208, "item_id": 49391013, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49391013", "by": "giantrobot", "date": "2026-08-21", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "There's public instances but you can self-host it as well.", "excerpt": "YaCy[0] is a P2P search engine. There's public instances but you can self-host it as well. It includes a spider to do your own crawling. It's challenging now between CloudFlare and other anti-bot CAPCHAS crawling effectively is really challenging. Bots (AI and otherwise) have ruined the web. [0] https://yacy.net/index.html", "context": "", "use_case": "P2P web search", "switched_from": "", "story": "What We Lost When Search Stopped Making Us Think"}, {"id": 780577136, "item_id": 48786071, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48786071", "by": "sunshine-o", "date": "2026-07-04", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "In theory if you run YaCy kiwix is not necessary", "excerpt": "Thanks you so much this is highly very valuable information. > Thanks to pointing out kiwix. I'll give it a try. I see YaCy works with ZIM files [0] packaged by Kiwix so this is great. In theory if you run YaCy kiwix is not necessary but they do package already valuable sites likes Wikipedia, iFixit, archwiki, etc. [0] so you do not have the worry of your crawler to be blocked and have local copy anyway [1]. So a lot", "context": "", "use_case": "local web search", "switched_from": "", "story": "SearXNG: A free internet metasearch engine"}, {"id": 780553344, "item_id": 48784584, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48784584", "by": "exiguus", "date": "2026-07-04", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "If you do this, it becomes very stable.", "excerpt": "I ran my own YaCY instances. Three of them to be specific, because they are \"super fast\" and \"reboot\" often. I crawl with them the smallweb, smallcomic and smallyt sites and also all feeds from my miniflux instance; getting them via the miniflux api. Beside that i have other static entries that i crawl. For wikibooks and wikipedia i tried and use also YaCY, but it use a lot of resources. So its only in one instance. ", "context": "", "use_case": "Self-hosted search crawler", "switched_from": "", "story": "SearXNG: A free internet metasearch engine"}, {"id": 772406960, "item_id": 48275435, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48275435", "by": "bicepjai", "date": "2026-05-25", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "solutions like hister and yacy that is so privacy conscious", "excerpt": "I don\u2019t see anyone talking about yacy. https://github.com/yacy/yacy_search_server I mean when we have solutions like hister and yacy that is so privacy conscious why are we still not using them to full extent. I understand it\u2019s not easy, but this is post llm era :)", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 794721937, "item_id": 49670121, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49670121", "by": "nairboon", "date": "2026-09-12", "stance": "warn", "quote": "but it takes ages to crawl the open web (and lots of storage)", "excerpt": "It's still kind of an open problem. There are partial solutions, but not yet really an integrated one. There is Hister: https://hister.org/ that builds some sort of drive-by index of what you're browsing anyway. And there are \"true p2p\" solutions like YaCy: https://yacy.net/ but it takes ages to crawl the open web (and lots of storage). There's still a lot of optimization to do in this space.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update"}, {"id": 790250112, "item_id": 49390632, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49390632", "by": "nosioptar", "date": "2026-08-21", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I didn't get useful results wheb I tested it though.", "excerpt": "There's yacy. I didn't get useful results wheb I tested it though. https://yacy.net/", "context": "", "use_case": "Peer-to-peer search engine", "switched_from": "", "story": "What We Lost When Search Stopped Making Us Think"}, {"id": 780539985, "item_id": 48783749, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48783749", "by": "sunshine-o", "date": "2026-07-04", "stance": "warn", "quote": "YaCy kind of slowly stream results for about 30 seconds", "excerpt": "> SearXNG is my daily internet search now +5 years Same here > with YaCY Backends and else as fallback. Do you run your own \"super fast\" YaCy instance? or with specific settings? My experience with YaCy is it doesn't fit in the backend of SearX since YaCy kind of slowly stream results for about 30 seconds... I also have a local `kiwix-serve` serving ZIM files of wikipedia, wiktionary, gutemberg, archwiki, etc. but sa", "context": "", "use_case": "Search backend", "switched_from": "", "story": "SearXNG: A free internet metasearch engine"}]}], "who": [], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["self-hosted web search", "p2p web search", "peer-to-peer search engine", "distributed search", "local web search", "self-hosted search crawler"], "compared": [{"slug": "searxng", "name": "SearXNG", "co": 4, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "miniflux", "name": "Miniflux", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "hister", "name": "Hister", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48779454", "title": "SearXNG: A free internet metasearch engine", "mentions": 3}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49668386", "title": "google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49388446", "title": "What We Lost When Search Stopped Making Us Think", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49155492", "title": "Ask HN: What are the viable alternatives to DuckDuckGo?", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48266051", "title": "Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47487436", "title": "Migrating to the EU", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {}, "2025-12": {}, "2026-01": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-02": {}, "2026-03": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-04": {}, "2026-05": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-06": {}, "2026-07": {"warn": 1, "recommend": 1}, "2026-08": {"neutral": 1, "warn": 1, "recommend": 1}, "2026-09": {"recommend": 1, "warn": 1}, "2026-10": {}}, "quotes": [{"id": 794721937, "item_id": 49670121, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49670121", "by": "nairboon", "date": "2026-09-12", "stance": "warn", "quote": "but it takes ages to crawl the open web (and lots of storage)", "excerpt": "It's still kind of an open problem. There are partial solutions, but not yet really an integrated one. There is Hister: https://hister.org/ that builds some sort of drive-by index of what you're browsing anyway. And there are \"true p2p\" solutions like YaCy: https://yacy.net/ but it takes ages to crawl the open web (and lots of storage). There's still a lot of optimization to do in this space.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update"}, {"id": 794710064, "item_id": 49669379, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49669379", "by": "orbital-decay", "date": "2026-09-12", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "https://yacy.net/", "excerpt": "https://yacy.net/", "context": "", "use_case": "Self-hosted web search", "switched_from": "", "story": "google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update"}, {"id": 790256208, "item_id": 49391013, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49391013", "by": "giantrobot", "date": "2026-08-21", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "There's public instances but you can self-host it as well.", "excerpt": "YaCy[0] is a P2P search engine. There's public instances but you can self-host it as well. It includes a spider to do your own crawling. It's challenging now between CloudFlare and other anti-bot CAPCHAS crawling effectively is really challenging. Bots (AI and otherwise) have ruined the web. [0] https://yacy.net/index.html", "context": "", "use_case": "P2P web search", "switched_from": "", "story": "What We Lost When Search Stopped Making Us Think"}, {"id": 790250112, "item_id": 49390632, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49390632", "by": "nosioptar", "date": "2026-08-21", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I didn't get useful results wheb I tested it though.", "excerpt": "There's yacy. I didn't get useful results wheb I tested it though. https://yacy.net/", "context": "", "use_case": "Peer-to-peer search engine", "switched_from": "", "story": "What We Lost When Search Stopped Making Us Think"}, {"id": 786555587, "item_id": 49159724, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49159724", "by": "SyneRyder", "date": "2026-08-03", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I thought I'd tried Yacy, but apparently not - it's a distributed search.", "excerpt": "Mojeek is okay, but I think I'd struggle to use it as my primary search. I do include it in my personal metasearch results though, and find it worth paying for their API access (at my usage it's only about $20/year). If a page shows up in both Brave & Mojeek, it's probably a good one. I thought I'd tried Yacy, but apparently not - it's a distributed search. SearX is by asciimoo, the same person who has moved on to ma", "context": "", "use_case": "distributed search", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What are the viable alternatives to DuckDuckGo?"}, {"id": 780577136, "item_id": 48786071, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48786071", "by": "sunshine-o", "date": "2026-07-04", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "In theory if you run YaCy kiwix is not necessary", "excerpt": "Thanks you so much this is highly very valuable information. > Thanks to pointing out kiwix. I'll give it a try. I see YaCy works with ZIM files [0] packaged by Kiwix so this is great. In theory if you run YaCy kiwix is not necessary but they do package already valuable sites likes Wikipedia, iFixit, archwiki, etc. [0] so you do not have the worry of your crawler to be blocked and have local copy anyway [1]. So a lot", "context": "", "use_case": "local web search", "switched_from": "", "story": "SearXNG: A free internet metasearch engine"}, {"id": 780553344, "item_id": 48784584, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48784584", "by": "exiguus", "date": "2026-07-04", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "If you do this, it becomes very stable.", "excerpt": "I ran my own YaCY instances. Three of them to be specific, because they are \"super fast\" and \"reboot\" often. I crawl with them the smallweb, smallcomic and smallyt sites and also all feeds from my miniflux instance; getting them via the miniflux api. Beside that i have other static entries that i crawl. For wikibooks and wikipedia i tried and use also YaCY, but it use a lot of resources. So its only in one instance. ", "context": "", "use_case": "Self-hosted search crawler", "switched_from": "", "story": "SearXNG: A free internet metasearch engine"}, {"id": 780539985, "item_id": 48783749, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48783749", "by": "sunshine-o", "date": "2026-07-04", "stance": "warn", "quote": "YaCy kind of slowly stream results for about 30 seconds", "excerpt": "> SearXNG is my daily internet search now +5 years Same here > with YaCY Backends and else as fallback. Do you run your own \"super fast\" YaCy instance? or with specific settings? My experience with YaCy is it doesn't fit in the backend of SearX since YaCy kind of slowly stream results for about 30 seconds... I also have a local `kiwix-serve` serving ZIM files of wikipedia, wiktionary, gutemberg, archwiki, etc. but sa", "context": "", "use_case": "Search backend", "switched_from": "", "story": "SearXNG: A free internet metasearch engine"}, {"id": 772406960, "item_id": 48275435, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48275435", "by": "bicepjai", "date": "2026-05-25", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "solutions like hister and yacy that is so privacy conscious", "excerpt": "I don\u2019t see anyone talking about yacy. https://github.com/yacy/yacy_search_server I mean when we have solutions like hister and yacy that is so privacy conscious why are we still not using them to full extent. I understand it\u2019s not easy, but this is post llm era :)", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore"}, {"id": 759958276, "item_id": 47497392, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47497392", "by": "exiguus", "date": "2026-03-23", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Search: Self-hosted SearXNG + YACY (since ~10 years / good setup & documentation)", "excerpt": "My next phone will be also one that is supported by GraphenOS. Currently, my private setup is: - VPN: Windscribe [CA] - AI: Mistral [FR] - Phone: De-Googled Fairphone [NL] (F-Droid/Aurora/OpenStreetMap) - Search: Self-hosted SearXNG + YACY (since ~10 years / good setup & documentation) - Domain Provider: INWX [DE] (since +10 years / good setup & documentation) - DNS: Self-hosted AdGuard Home / dnscrypt-proxy 2 + dnsd", "context": "", "use_case": "Self-hosted search", "switched_from": "", "story": "Migrating to the EU"}, {"id": 747727200, "item_id": 46732950, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46732950", "by": "nairboon", "date": "2026-01-23", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I consider the idea of YaCy kind of interesting", "excerpt": "Regarding alternate search engines: I consider the idea of YaCy kind of interesting: a P2P search engine: https://yacy.net/ Although, it needs some more work and peers to be usable as a general-purpose search engine.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Google is ending full-web search for niche search engines"}]}