WHAT IS THIS?



YaCy is a search engine software. It takes a new approach to search

because it does not use a central server. Instead, its search results

come from a network of independent peers. In such a distributed network,

no single entity decides what gets listed, or in which order results appear.



The YaCy search engine runs on each user's own computer. Search terms are

hashed before they leave the user's computer. Different from conventional

search engines, YaCy is designed to protect the users' privacy.

A user's computer can create with YaCy its individual search indexes and

rankings, so that results better match what the user is looking for over time.

YaCy also makes it easy to create a customized search portal with a few clicks.



Each YaCy user is either part of a large search network (YaCy contains a

peer-to-peer network protocol to exchange search indexes with other YaCy

search engine installations) or the user runs YaCy to produce

a personal search portal that can be either public or private.



YaCy search portals can also be placed in intranet environment which makes

YaCy a replacement for commercial enterprise search solutions. A network

scanner makes it easy to discover all available http, ftp and smb servers.



To create a web index, YaCy has a web crawler for 

everybody, without censorship and central data retention:

- search the web (automatically using all other YaCy peers)

- co-operative crawling; support for other crawlers

- intranet indexing and search

- set up your own search portal

- all users have equal rights

- comprehensive concept to anonymise the users' index



To be able to perform a search using the YaCy network, every user has to

set up their own node. More users are leading to higher index capacity

and better distributed indexing performance.





LICENSE

YaCy is published under the GPL v2

The source code is inside the release package (see /source and /htroot).





WHERE IS THE DOCUMENTATION?



Documentation can be found at:

(Home Page)     http://yacy.net/

(German Forum)  http://forum.yacy.de/

(Wiki:de)       http://www.yacy-websuche.de/wiki/index.php/De:Start

(Wiki:en)       http://www.yacy-websearch.net/wiki/index.php/En:Start



Every of these locations has a (YaCy) search functionality which combines

all these locations into one search result.





DEPENDENCIES? WHAT OTHER SOFTWARE DO I NEED?



You need java 1.5 or later to run YaCy, nothing else.

Please download it from http://www.java.com



YaCy also runs on IcedTea6.

See http://icedtea.classpath.org



NO OTHER SOFTWARE IS REQUIRED!

(you don't need apache, tomcat or mysql or whatever)





HOW DO I START THIS SOFTWARE?



Startup and Shutdown of YaCy:



- on Linux:

to start: execute ./startYACY.sh

to stop : execute ./stopYACY.sh



- on Windows:

to start: double-click startYACY.bat

to stop : double-click stopYACY.bat



- on Mac OS X:

please use the Mac Application and start or stop it like any

other Mac Application (doubleclick to start)





HOW DO I USE THIS SOFTWARE, WHERE IS THE ADMINISTRATION INTERFACE?



YaCy is a build on a web server. After you started YaCy,

start your browser and open



   http://localhost:8090



There you can see your personal search and administration interface.





WHAT IF I INSTALL YACY (HEADLESS) ON A SERVER



You can do that but YaCy authorizes users automatically if they

access the server from the localhost. After about 10 minutes a random

password is generated and then it is not possible to log in from

a remote location. If you install YaCy on a server that is not your

workstation, then you must set an administration account immediately

after the first start-up. Open:



http://<remote-server-address>:8090/ConfigAccounts_p.html



and set an administration account.





DEVELOPER:



YaCy was created with the help of many. About 30 programmers have helped,

a list of some of them can be seen here: http://yacy.net/en/Join.html

Please join us!





HOW TO GET THE SOURCE CODE AND HOW TO COMPILE YACY YOURSELF?



The source code is inside every YaCy release. You can also get YaCy

from https://gitorious.org/yacy/rc1

Please clone our code and help with development!

The code is licensed under the GPL v2.



Compiling YaCy:

- you need java 1.5 and ant

- just compile: "ant clean all" - then you can "./startYACY.sh"

- create a release tarball: "ant dist"

- create a Mac OS release: "ant distMacApp" (works only on a Mac)

- create a debian release: "ant deb"

- work with eclipse: within eclipse you also need to start the ant build process

  because the servlet pages are not compiled by the eclipse build process

after the dist prodecure, the release can be found in the RELEASE subdirectory





ARE THERE ANY APIs OR HOW CAN I ATTACH SOFTWARE AT YACY?



There are many interfaces build-in in YaCy and they are all based on http/xml and

http/json. You can discover these interfaces if you notice the orange "API" icon in

the upper right of some web pages in the YaCy web interface. Just click on it and

you will see the xml/json version of the information you just have seen at the web

page.

A different approach is the usage of the shell script provided in the /bin

subdirectory. The just call also the web interface pages. By cloning some of those

scripts you can create more shell api access methods yourself easily.





CONTACT:



Our primary point of contact is the german forum at http://forum.yacy.net

There is also an english forum at http://www.yacy-forum.org

We encourage you to start a YaCy forum in your own language.



If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact the maintainer:

Send an email to Michael Christen (mc@yacy.net) with a meaningful subject

including the word 'yacy' to prevent that your email gets stuck

in my anti-spam filter.



If you like to have a customized version for special needs,

feel free to ask the author for a business proposal to customize YaCy

according to your needs. We also provide integration solutions if the

software is about to be integrated into your enterprise application.



Germany, Frankfurt a.M., 26.11.2011

Michael Peter Christen