FSF Europe starts distributed search engine, seeks peers & developers

[Tim McNamara]

http://yacy.net/

As well as WWW, YaCy can be used for intranets and other networks such
as Tor. There's a writeup in ComputerworldNZ[1], which appears
syndicated from Belgium:

"The free, distributed search engine, YaCy, takes a new approach to
search. Rather than using a central server, its search results come
from a network of independent "peers," users who have downloaded the
YaCy software. The aim is that no single entity gets to decide what
gets listed, or in which order results appear.

"Most of what we do on the Internet involves search. It's the vital
link between us and the information we're looking for. For such an
essential function, we cannot rely on a few large companies and
compromise our privacy in the process," said Michael Christen, YaCy's
project leader."


Tim McNamara
paperlessprojects.com

[1] http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/free-software-activists-to-take-on-google


p.s. I think it's the first time that Computer World NZ has used
GNU/Linux before Windows in an article

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[Robin Paulson]

Post by Tim McNamara
http://yacy.net/

i don't want to sound like i'm down on this as it is a wonderful
project and google should be getting far more free software/data
competition than it is, but yacy is 5 years old now.

does this article say more about computer world than yacy?

anyway on the subject of the software, i ran a node for a while.
bonuses: it turned up good results, i'd use it permanently in a
heartbeat.
problem: it's fat, it needs serious RAM and storage, and a lot of
bandwidth. a search query downloaded the order of 10s of MB from other
peers, and my weedy 384MB RAN/5GB hard drive VPS was not up to it, it
started impacting other services on the server.

has anyone else here tried it, on something more powerful?

glad to see they're encouraging developers and getting FSF funding, i'd
like to see this project take off and become more mainstream

[Tim McNamara]

I know nothing of the technology. Have fired it up on my laptop to see
how things work. Perhaps the p2p protocol could be reimplemented in
something like node.js/Twisted/Erlang?

FWIW, if this were to start from scratch I think a distributed crawler
using Hadoop/HDFS would make lots of sense.

Post by Tim McNamara
http://yacy.net/

i don't want to sound like i'm down on this as it is a wonderful project and
google should be getting far more free software/data competition than it is,
but yacy is 5 years old now.
does this article say more about computer world than yacy?
anyway on the subject of the software, i ran a node for a while.
bonuses: it turned up good results, i'd use it permanently in a heartbeat.
problem: it's fat, it needs serious RAM and storage, and a lot of bandwidth.
a search query downloaded the order of 10s of MB from other peers, and my
weedy 384MB RAN/5GB hard drive VPS was not up to it, it started impacting
other services on the server.
has anyone else here tried it, on something more powerful?
glad to see they're encouraging developers and getting FSF funding, i'd like
to see this project take off and become more mainstream
--
robin
http://fu.ac.nz - Auckland's Free University
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