According to the German Wikipedia YaCy turned 10 this year. On December 15th 2003 Michael Christen publicly mentioned his idea of a peer-to-peer base search engine in the comments of a news article published at heise.de, a German IT news website, for the first time.
When I learned about YaCy a few months later, it was still in it’s very humble beginnings. I think there already was a website, but there was no version control for the source code, no forum, and only a small community of 2 or 3 developers. The crawler was not yet finished and indexing was done via the proxy which is still included today. I still remember how excited I was when my index contained the first 1000 documents and how disappointed I was when I lost them because Michael changed the database format once again (Solr was still far, far away). 😉
During the last 10 years I have been laughed at (this has not happened for along time) and yelled at (only once at 26c3), but most of the time I had lots of fun learning and getting to know quite a few funny, interesting, and inspiring people. I visited places and events I would not have attended if it was not for YaCy and I got a nice certificate. 🙂
Even though I have never been the most active contributor, I hope that YaCy will stay a part of my life for at least another 10 years.
EN
I know YaCy since 3 years but I just started a little short time ago with running my own yacy peer and supporting the project. YaCy is a great idea and it works very good. Hope it will become more and more popular in the future.
DE
Ich kenne YaCy seit circa 3 Jahren habe aber erst vor kurzem damit angefangen das Projekt durch das Betreiben eines eigenen Peers aktiv zu unterstützen. Ich muss sagen: „Hut ab!“. YaCy ist besser als man denkt und die Idee dahinter ist unendlich groß.
Wow, 10 years, I never thought that it will last that long. When the idea came up in december 2003, I prepared a first ’shipment‘ two days later consisting only of a http proxy experiment that I did in 2003 to learn http. The original package was named ‚AnomicHTTPProxy‘ and can be downloaded here: http://yacy.net/release/yacy_v0.00_20031218.tar.gz
I am very thankful for the many ‚likes‘ I got (before FB existed) when people wrote by mail how much they are fascinated by the idea of a distributed search engine. And during the time many people helped with coding, (re-)designing, discussing, supporting, translating, announcing the software and I would like to say ‚thank you‘ to all of you for joining and helping us.
Unter http://yacy.net/ ist zur Zeit nur ein Strato Hinweis zu finden ðŸ™
http://yacy.net/ shows a Strato error 🙠I hope you manage another 10 years but please fix this 😉
Das hängt wohl zur Zeit beim Support des Hosters. Michael ist jedenfalls dran: http://forum.yacy-websuche.de/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=5160