# YaCy

13 Hacker News commenters recommended YaCy and 6 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 6 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Free, self-hostable peer-to-peer search engine with a distributed index, liked for privacy; critics say results are weak and it needs more peers and resources.

## Why people recommend it

- Free and self-hostable (3 comments): "YaCy is something you can host, and it has a peer to peer distributed index." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50147558)) "YaCy does a pretty good job, and is free, and you can run yourself" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46586723)) "Installs from binary, little maintenance, scheduled crawls." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46484118))
- Privacy-conscious distributed index (2 comments): "YaCy is something you can host, and it has a peer to peer distributed index." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50147558)) "when we have solutions like hister and yacy that is so privacy conscious" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48275435))
- Interesting project with good ideas (2 comments): "I found it didn't really work as a real search engine but it was interesting." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46730722)) "I also enjoyed YaCy, that project should have a good amount of ideas for you." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49745892))

## What people warn about

- Poor results for regular queries (4 comments): "I found it didn't really work as a real search engine but it was interesting." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46730722)) "It doesn't give good results for regular queries though" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50014980)) "Back around 2008 it didn't give great results either." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49391003))
- Heavy on RAM, disk and storage (4 comments): "rather RAM hungry for crawling and not great about space occupation either on the disk" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49544234)) "the index grow in size very fast and reaches ~100GB or more" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48783783)) "takes ages to crawl the open web (and lots of storage)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49670121))
- Needs more peers and nodes (2 comments): "it needs some more work and peers to be usable as a general-purpose search engine" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46732950)) "Yacy exists but it lacks nodes." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48215857))
- Slow to crawl and return results (2 comments): "My experience with YaCy is it doesn't fit in the backend of SearX since YaCy kind of slowly stream results for about 30 seconds" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48783749)) "takes ages to crawl the open web (and lots of storage)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49670121))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Google Search](https://hackerapproved.com/p/google-search.md): 315 recommend
- [Yandex Search](https://hackerapproved.com/p/yandex.md): 79 recommend
- [Marginalia Search](https://hackerapproved.com/p/marginalia-search.md): 50 recommend
- [Bing](https://hackerapproved.com/p/bing.md): 33 recommend
- [Ecosia](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ecosia.md): 24 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "YaCy", https://hackerapproved.com/p/yacy/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).