The YaCy logo. It shows the YaCy name, with a star next to the final Y. Below it are the words 'Search Engine'.

Yacy Part 2: Crawling and Putting it on the Backburner

This is the second post in my series on the YaCy distributed, self-hosted search engine. The main topic this time is getting pages into the search index via crawling. In contrast to search engines like Google, Bing or Kagi, the content of the search index in YaCy is driven by its users. YaCy has an integrated web crawler to crawl pages and add them to the search index. It can be invoked in one of three ways: ...

June 21, 2026 · 12 min · Michael
The YaCy logo. It shows the YaCy name, with a star next to the final Y. Below it are the words 'Search Engine'.

Yacy Part 1: Deployment

Welcome to the newest rabbit hole I’ve found myself in. This post starts a new series where I’m taking a look at the YaCy self-hosted, distributed peer to peer search engine. And probably web crawling and search ranking algorithms. In this post, I will concentrate on how I deployed YaCy into my Kubernetes cluster, and a few pieces about my first steps with it. You won’t find answers to questions like “how good is it as a Google replacement?” in this post. There’s a lot more work ahead for me to actually make that judgment. ...

June 7, 2026 · 18 min · Michael
The FreshRSS logo. It is based on the RSS logo, with the dot in the center and the two radio transmission waves in the top right quarter of the logo. FreshRSS adds radio waves in the top left and bottom right quarters as well.

FreshRSS: An RSS/Atom Feed Reader

Wherein I end up replacing my Brief setup for RSS with FreshRSS. Over the holidays, I visited my family and only had my laptop with me. While I have most things properly synced, my RSS feed subscriptions are not. Up to now, I’ve been using the Brief Firefox extension. It looks like this: Example of the Brief UI ...

January 5, 2026 · 14 min · Michael