YaCy
by YaCy · Self-hosted search engine software with a peer-to-peer index
BenchRank score
Screenshots of YaCy
Homepage
Overview
YaCy is free search engine software that you install and run yourself. It can search a local or shared file system and an intranet, act as a self-defined crawler and search portal for an organisation, or join a peer-to-peer network in which many independently run devices contribute to a shared index. It collects no personalised data and has no phone-home.
- Best for
- Organisations and individuals wanting to run their own search index instead of using a hosted engine.
- Pricing
- The captured page describes YaCy as free software and shows no prices; it asks for donations and links to Patreon and GitHub Sponsors, and mentions paid-unstated consulting.
Strengths and trade-offs
Strengths
- Free software you install and run on your own machines
- Covers local, intranet and organisation-wide search portals
- P2P mode shares an index across independently run peers
- No personalised data collection and no phone-home
Trade-offs
- You must host the software and run your own crawl to build an index
- The project depends on donations and community contributions
- Captured pages give no detail on setup effort or hardware requirements
How YaCy markets itself
A structured read of the promise, proof and page design on YaCy’s captured homepage.
Homepage capture
“YaCy is free software for your own search engine.”
- Angle: Open source / ownership
- Hero: Product screenshot
Pricing
Published plans and prices from YaCy’s own pricing page.
How this score is made up
Each dimension is scored out of 100 and combined into the headline score using fixed weights.
MCP support
Whether an agent can drive the product through the Model Context Protocol, and how much setup that takes.
Documentation
Publicly reachable docs — coverage, freshness, code samples and machine readability.
Agent friendliness
How readable the site is to an automated client: llms.txt, structured data, server-rendered content, crawler access.
Changelog
A public, dated record of what shipped and when — the clearest signal that a product is still alive.
Marketing site structure
Whether the site answers a buyer's questions: clear positioning, the pages that matter, and accessibility.
Page speed
How fast the site loads for real visitors: Chrome UX Report 75th-percentile LCP, INP and CLS, with a Lighthouse mobile run standing in where a site has too little traffic for field data.
Operational trust
Status page and incident history, security disclosure, compliance and data-processing documentation.
Measured, but not part of the score
Useful to know, but not a mark for or against the product — so these do not affect the ranking.
Openness
Source availability, self-hosting, data export and open standards. Scored and shown, but not part of the composite — paid SaaS is not worse for being paid SaaS.
Maintenance
Release cadence and repository activity. Scored and shown, but not part of the composite — it is only measurable for open repositories.
This doesn’t look right — report a problem with YaCy’s score
Where this comes from
The YaCy pages BenchRank reads when it scores the product — its documentation, release notes, status and security pages, and its repository where there is one.
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Is this your product?
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