Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search sites have a new rival called YaCy.

Backed by free software activists, YaCy aims to literally put search into the hands of users by distributing its indexing engine around the net.

Anyone can download the YaCy software and help the search system improve and spread the load of queries.

Its creators also hope YaCy will be much harder to censor than existing systems that pipe queries through centralised servers.

Peer privacy
The YaCy search page was opened to the public on 28 November and currently has about 600 participants or peers that share the load of queries and the task of indexing information.

"Most of what we do on the internet involves search," said Michael Christen, YaCy's project leader in a statement. "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," he said.

YaCy (pronounced "Ya See") is supported by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) which campaigns on digital rights and tries to help people control their own digital destiny.

FSFE said YaCy helps privacy by encrypting all queries and by letting peer owners build up and manage their own search profile.

"We are moving away from the idea that services need to be centrally controlled," said Karsten Gerloff, president of the FSFE. "Instead, we are realising how important it is to be independent, and to create infrastructure that doesn't have a single point of failure."

YaCy software is available for Windows, Linux and MacOS and users are being encouraged to download and run it for themselves.

The first version of YaCy has been used and refined on intranets for the FSFE and the Sciencenet search site.

On its opening day, the YaCy demo page struggled to handle all the queries coming its way.

The prospects for YaCy's success are mixed as there have many other pretenders to Google's crown. One of the most notable was a search engine called Cuil that was set up by two former Google workers.

Cuil launched in 2008 and struggled to win over significant numbers of users. It shut down in late September, 2010.

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say ya last prayer :google2: :rocketwho

i really hope these guys make it, but i doubt it somehow ^^

Every week a new sh*ty search engine comes out

247hustle said:

i really hope these guys make it, but i doubt it somehow ^^

Click to expand...

yeah lets hope they make it but i doubt it that they can ever beat them according to this thread

Three letters: lol

I just can't see how a start-up search engine could envision itself as being competition for the bigger SE's...especially, when the user must download software..Thanks Op for the info...

This looks terrible, deadpool in 3-4 months.

I heard someone on the radio the other day say "Go to yahoo and google it"

So, here to stay

Search Engines can't work without centralized quality control! Why? Because we exist.

Something like this can only ever be successful on a small scale. If they make it so that discerning users find something in it that really works for them, then it can be something for those who are "in the know", but the fact that people refer to web searching as "Googling" tells you all you need to know. It's practically a monopoly; hell, people who use Bing are considered weird.

I'd like to be more positive about this, because more competition should mean the companies work harder, but launching a new search engine is like launching a new cola. You can make it as good as possible, push it in all the right ways and even be better than anything else around, but you're still aiming for #3 at best.

There's also Majestic12 (I'm sure you've seen its bot in your log files. http://www.majestic12.co.uk/), which indexes the content on the web by having users to run the indexing bot. That stuff is distributed computing - similar to SETI@Home and such projects.

LOL there is no competition for Google.. None.. at all.

Really hope to see some competition here. IMO only Facebook and probably Siri can make a little danger to Google

Nothing will take Google down, at least for years and years to come. FaceBook isn't competition, Google Plus is the competition to FaceBook, not the other way around, and even then FaceBook is no threat to Google itself. And Siri, lol, I don't think so, Apple's not quite that big.

Google will not go down without a fight. No one on earth can beat google now they are too big

I actually love the idea, they decentralize the DATABASE, not only the queries. For us it means only one thing - better and less controlled Internet.

I will certainly try them out once the network grows to reasonable numbers. Its like torrent - when query is activated only part of the network sees it.