YaCy calling MetaSearch engine(s)

YaCy
1

Hi All,

First of all let me say Merry Christmas and wishing you a Happy New Year for 2020.

I had taken a short hiatus while working on a project that I was considering to use YaCy as a backend, but over my time away and while I get things back ramped up, it has now occurred to me that YaCy may be a much better fit in a primary role for this project. So, with that in mind, I am re-developing the whole process around YaCy since the distributed nature is extremely appealing to me for my project.

So then, I have been researching on how one might be able to have YaCy call a meta-search engine and found a YaCy link to a now defunct project, from what I understand, called “Seeks”

https://wiki.yacy.net/index.php/En:Seeks

For my project, I need to call one, possibly two meta-search engines along with the YaCy indexes such that the results from the meta-search engine are collects, added to the YaCy indexes, and returned to the frontend.

In this way, if a similar query is made, then some of the previous queried results are already in the YaCy distributed database of pages much like a cache.

I know that this might require me to modify some parts of YaCy and I am hoping to get some guidance on this as well as the best way to proceed forward as it seems that some type of plugin might be possible in this case, but I do not really know.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers,

2

The function you are looking for is called “Heuristics” in YaCy. It applies a post-search remote index collection mechanism, based on the Opensearch standard.

That acually means

  • YaCy can do metasearch BUT YaCy does not wait for search results from remote indexes to present a search result for the current search
  • This requires that remote indexes provide Opensearch functionality.

Even if YaCy is not waiting for remote results, it my happen that they appear so fast that they actually can be presented in the search request that triggered the remote search.

You find the function in:
Ranking and Heuristics -> opensearch