Yacy has been there for a long time, before the concept of fediverse, and before our increased concerns about privacy.

Such a nice project, but too bad it never gathered a strong userbase.

If I read it correctly, YaCy is like using a torrent except the information being shared between peers is search information. When you do a search you’re essentially asking everyone else in the swarm for access to their YaCy search cache. The bigger the swarm the more data is available. It seems you can also initiate your own webcrawling to increase the size of the cache you share. So the searches are completely decentralized and unmodified by any profit-motivated algorithms and come directly from other users searches/crawling. It also seems impossible to be tracked this way. You could see that your IP was connected to the swarm, but it doesn’t seem possible to know what it’s doing on the swarm because there is no central server to log it, just a bunch of direct connections between computers in the swarm.

I don’t know correctly, for example YaCy site describes that.

Bleh, presearch is tied to crypto nonsense. I think something like YaCy is a more viable project. I can’t say if one is better than the other functionally, but I feel like anyone trying to get away from Google is doing it because of the excessive monetization messing with their searches, to then switch to something built to prop up a token/coin seems a bit strange imo.

Presearch has been my default search engine for over a year. It is a functional replacement for Google, but not without its quirks. Image searches are vastly better on Google in my experience. And I still search frequently on Google Maps for data that is heavily influenced by location.

Thank you, seems to be interesting