YaCy – A Decentralized Peer-to-Peer Search Engine: Installation and Quick Start Guide
Posted: 01 Jun 2026, 10:30
YaCy is a free, decentralized search engine based on a peer-to-peer (P2P) network. Unlike traditional search engines, there is no central server that processes all search queries or controls the entire search index. Instead, each participant runs their own "peer", which crawls websites, indexes their content, and shares the collected data with other peers.
Documentation:
https://yacy.net/docs/
Download:
https://yacy.net/download_installation/#package-linux
Extract and start:
Then open the following URL in a web browser:
http://localhost:8090/
The YaCy web interface should then appear.
Note: Java is required.
If Java is not installed, you can download an OpenJDK module here:
https://www.mediafire.com/file/0hk9sy0w ... 0.xzm/file
To ensure that YaCy can find Java, you may need to run the following command:
Documentation:
https://yacy.net/docs/
Download:
https://yacy.net/download_installation/#package-linux
Extract and start:
Code: Select all
tar xfz yacy<VERSION>.tar.gz
cd yacy<VERSION>
./startYACY.shhttp://localhost:8090/
The YaCy web interface should then appear.
Note: Java is required.
If Java is not installed, you can download an OpenJDK module here:
https://www.mediafire.com/file/0hk9sy0w ... 0.xzm/file
To ensure that YaCy can find Java, you may need to run the following command:
Code: Select all
export PATH=/usr/lib64/java/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/games