# YaCy improved-search

> An experimental fork of the YaCy peer-to-peer web search engine that you run yourself: crawl the sites you need and search them without a search API or API key, with stricter ranking, Chinese/Japanese/Korean search, author signatures on every document, coordinator-signed trust lists and NAT traversal through a libp2p relay. It comes with an MCP server and an agent skill, and with reproducible docker compose experiments that measure search quality.

Use it when a task needs web search you control, a private index of chosen sites, results whose origin is verifiable, or when you want to improve and measure search ranking. It indexes only what you (or peers you trust) crawled; it is not a copy of the whole web. It does not interoperate with the public YaCy network (freeworld) by default.

Quick start: `docker run -d --name yacy -p 127.0.0.1:8090:8090 -v yacy_data:/opt/yacy_search_server/DATA ghcr.io/pad01g/yacy-improved-search:latest`, then the MCP server `docker run -i --rm -e YACY_URL=http://host.docker.internal:8090 -e YACY_ADMIN_PASSWORD=yacy ghcr.io/pad01g/yacy-search-mcp:0.1.0` (MCP registry name `io.github.pad01g/yacy-search`; tools: search, crawl, index_status, peers, get_ranking_settings, set_ranking_setting, evaluate_ranking, trust_status).

## Use it

- [Agent skill (SKILL.md)](https://github.com/pad01g/yacy-lab/blob/main/skills/yacy-p2p-search/SKILL.md): start a peer, connect the MCP server, crawl, search, tune and evaluate ranking, join trusted peers. Install: `npx skills add pad01g/yacy-lab`
- [MCP server](https://github.com/pad01g/yacy_search_server/tree/improved-search/mcp): stdio server for one YaCy peer, as a Docker image
- [Trust registry](https://github.com/pad01g/yacy-trust): coordinator tQyLZkWjlTupmUCxU7WcXfYG9eDjfmJbOWzMOWQcVEc; a merged pull request lists a peer or an operator ([llms.txt](https://pad01g.github.io/yacy-trust/llms.txt))

## Understand it

- [Overview](https://pad01g.github.io/yacy_search_server/): what changed, measured results, demo, limits
- [Trust and NAT design](https://pad01g.github.io/yacy_search_server/design.html): identity, signed seeds, trust lists, author signatures, relay
- [FORK.md](https://github.com/pad01g/yacy_search_server/blob/improved-search/FORK.md): every change with its cause, settings, build and test commands
- [Lab](https://github.com/pad01g/yacy-lab): docker compose experiments (upstream vs fork ranking; trust and NAT with 26 checks) and a browser demo

## Optional

- [Design document (Japanese, full)](https://github.com/pad01g/yacy_search_server/blob/improved-search/docs/trust-and-nat.md)
- [Upstream YaCy](https://github.com/yacy/yacy_search_server)