YACY for Beginners
You may be like me, and understand that Yacy is the only pure, incorruptible privacy solution for search. P2P is the only way to go if you really want private search. All the other methods are either; corruptible (like DuckDuckGo – what a shame), or cannot assure your privacy 100%. So with that in mind, one would really like to make Yacy work.
Noobs to Yacy will find its easy to install for most by just following the instructions. However once installed, Yacy tends to crash.
Its frustrating because there is not much advice/documentation available to the NOOB/beginner. The funding to create Yacy probably didn’t include documentation that would provide a smooth on-ramp – its simply not there. There is a lot of material in the forum, but the most valuable material is in German, and all of it is over the head of beginners. One day if I find the time, I’d voluteer to mend that, but in the interim, I’m posting here on my notebook.
To the credit of Michael Christen (Orbiter) creator of Yacy, its difficult to create a complex machine like Yacy and also make it easy to use.
For beginners to use Yacy is analogous to diving into the deep end of the pool. Its easy for the professional swimmer, the JAVA programmer or IT pro, but the ordinary dog-paddling-beginner like me finds the deep end a real uncomfortable place to start. But it doesn’t have to be scary or frustrating with a little orientation.
Firstly, Yacy crashes are almost always due to resources and allocation, which I address in another post called How To Configure Yacy. The take-away here; if you do not have a robust environment with lots of RAM and free disk space, you will get frustrated trying to get the setting just right. Get used to freezes and crashes.
The caveat is if you use YaCy for indexing your Intranet, it probably doesn’t need a lot of resources for that.
Regardless, there are things you have to know. So lets get started.
How to configure Yacy to operate optimally on your machine (without crashing)
What to do when Yacy crashes. (Debugging and how to know when it has crashed)