YaCy
Hacker ApprovedRanked 21 of 38 search engines by recommenders
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.
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.
19 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 13
- criticize it
- 6
- approval share
- 68%
Recommended in 6 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 13 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 2.2 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 6 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Free and self-hostable
“YaCy is something you can host, and it has a peer to peer distributed index.”
Comment from 19 Oct 2026 in “DeepSeek search and fetch – $0.75 per 1000 successful requests” “YaCy does a pretty good job, and is free, and you can run yourself”
Comment from 12 Jan 2026 in “Don't fall into the anti-AI hype” “Installs from binary, little maintenance, scheduled crawls.”
Comment from 4 Jan 2026 in “wkhtmltopdf - Convert HTML to PDF Using QtWebKit (2021)” Privacy-conscious distributed index
“YaCy is something you can host, and it has a peer to peer distributed index.”
Comment from 19 Oct 2026 in “DeepSeek search and fetch – $0.75 per 1000 successful requests” “when we have solutions like hister and yacy that is so privacy conscious”
Comment from 26 May 2026 in “Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore” Interesting project with good ideas
“I found it didn't really work as a real search engine but it was interesting.”
Comment from 23 Jan 2026 in “Google is ending full-web search for niche search engines” “I also enjoyed YaCy, that project should have a good amount of ideas for you.”
Comment from 17 Sep 2026 in “Hister: A private search engine for the pages you visit and the files you keep”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Poor results for regular queries
“I found it didn't really work as a real search engine but it was interesting.”
Comment from 23 Jan 2026 in “Google is ending full-web search for niche search engines” “It doesn't give good results for regular queries though”
Comment from 9 Oct 2026 in “Show HN: Peer-to-peer web search over the YaCy network” “Back around 2008 it didn't give great results either.”
Comment from 21 Aug 2026 in “What We Lost When Search Stopped Making Us Think” - Comment from 21 Aug 2026 in “What We Lost When Search Stopped Making Us Think”
Heavy on RAM, disk and storage
“rather RAM hungry for crawling and not great about space occupation either on the disk”
Comment from 2 Sep 2026 in “Build your own self-hosted P2P search stack” “the index grow in size very fast and reaches ~100GB or more”
Comment from 4 Jul 2026 in “SearXNG: A free internet metasearch engine” “takes ages to crawl the open web (and lots of storage)”
Comment from 12 Sep 2026 in “google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update” - Comment from 4 Jul 2026 in “SearXNG: A free internet metasearch engine”
Needs more peers and nodes
“it needs some more work and peers to be usable as a general-purpose search engine”
Comment from 23 Jan 2026 in “Google is ending full-web search for niche search engines” “Yacy exists but it lacks nodes.”
Comment from 20 May 2026 in “Google Declaring War on the Web” Slow to crawl and return results
“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”
Comment from 4 Jul 2026 in “SearXNG: A free internet metasearch engine” “takes ages to crawl the open web (and lots of storage)”
Comment from 12 Sep 2026 in “google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update”
Other search engines people recommend
The four most recommended other search engines, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kagi | 732 | 234 | 76% | 13 | 2 yrs106 owners | Approved |
| Google Search | 315 | 1,039 | 23% | 12 | 20 yrs25 owners | — |
| DuckDuckGo | 286 | 204 | 58% | 12 | 3.5 yrs47 owners | — |
| Hister | 81 | 9 | 90% | 9 | 2 mo17 owners | Approved |
| YaCyThis page | 13 | 6 | 68% | 6 | — | Approved |
What people said
17 of the 20 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“YaCy is something you can host, and it has a peer to peer distributed index.”
“It doesn't give good results for regular queries though”
“I also enjoyed YaCy, that project should have a good amount of ideas for you.”
“takes ages to crawl the open web (and lots of storage)”
“rather RAM hungry for crawling and not great about space occupation either on the disk”
“Back around 2008 it didn't give great results either.”
“I didn't get useful results wheb I tested it though.”
“but it use a lot of resources”
“the index grow in size very fast and reaches ~100GB or more”
“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”
“when we have solutions like hister and yacy that is so privacy conscious”
“Yacy exists but it lacks nodes.”
“it just isn't very good as it suffers from lack of attention/interest”
“it needs some more work and peers to be usable as a general-purpose search engine”
“I found it didn't really work as a real search engine but it was interesting.”
“YaCy does a pretty good job, and is free, and you can run yourself”
“Installs from binary, little maintenance, scheduled crawls.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.