YaCy, a distributed Web Search Engine, based on a peer-to-peer network

I actually half wrote a RFC of a spec and 2 implementations of a federated search last year. Rather than do the disturbed hash table that yacy does. I wanted results to be re-rankable by the peers by sharing the scores that went into them. The idea being with a common protocol based on the ideas of ActivityPub you could get peers of searches working together to hopefully surface interesting things. Something I should probably finish and publish at some…

Never loads anything besides a blue background. Maybe it's waiting on a block?

The project is solid technically, but, IMHO, lacks performance compared to mainstream search engines, and suffers from very poor UX/design (too many knobs). A few years ago, I did setup a node at home to help the network but gave up a few months later, the computations/network crawls being too intensive.