YaCy

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-to-peer 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. Double-clicking 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.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/e7KbYkGanA8/0,2817,2397258,00.asp

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