Disadvantages
- There is no NAT traversal functionality built into YaCy, which prevents the software from being widespread as it might be since an ability to configure the local router, which is not always possible, requires some expertise to perform correctly.
- As there is no central server and the YaCy network is open to anyone, malicious peers are (theoretically) able to insert inaccurate or commercially biased search results. In theory no search result displayed to the user can be 'wrong' since all results are verified by downloading each page from the result set to see if the searched words actually exist on the page from the search result URL. However, YaCy uses a User agent string to identify itself, meaning a web server could send down different content to a YaCy crawler than to a normal visitor.
- The YaCy protocol uses HTTP-Requests, which can be slower than non-text (binary-only) protocols, if left uncompressed.
- The ranking of sites is done on the YaCy client side (users are encouraged to run their own YaCy server, as using a local server is necessary to gain many of the benefits of YaCy). The ranking algorithms, although easily customized, do not have their workload distributed and are limited to the use of the YaCy word index and whatever analysis can be done on the object being ranked. Therefore, more complex ranking algorithms such as those used by Google (which analyse rank using a variety of contextual factors developed during content crawling) are not, yet, feasible in YaCy, placing limits on most users' means to retrieve more relevant results.
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