Technology

Since YaCy is Open-Source software, all architecture details are also open and documented. We give here a very short overview: YaCy has four main components: a web crawler, a indexing engine, a database engine, and a user interface with an integrated search page:

YaCy runs a large number of processes which operate on data stacks and data queues that are filled during a web crawl and indexing process. YaCy does a real-time indexing, that means all pages that pass the crawler are instantly searchable (in contrast to batch-processing of other search engine software). The following is an overview of the data queues in YaCy:

All YaCy peers can operate with each other in a peer-to-peer network. It does not need a central server to operate, because the data is stored in a self-organizing data structure over the peers: