 Are you concerned about online privacy? If you are, you're probably a little confused about what search engine you should be using because many of them, of course, are tracking every move you make while you're using their particular search engines. But one of the ones that I've played with on and off in the last few years is a search engine called YACI. What is YACI? Well, let me pull up my desktop here and pull up a browser and go to YACI.net. That's their homepage. YACI is a distributed, decentralized web search engine. It's based on peer-to-peer technology, so you download it, you install it, and you have this search engine available on localhost. You have it available right there on your local machine. YACI is cross-platform, so it's available for Windows, Mac, and, of course, Linux. So to install YACI, all you need to do is go to the download tab here on their page and then find the instructions for your operating system, Windows, Mac, Linux. What I did is I followed the very last set of instructions, compile YACI yourself. It involves copying and pasting three commands in the terminal, right? So it's very easy to do, and this should work on any Linux distribution. There are some dependencies. You do need Oracle Java 8 or OpenJDK 8 installed on your system. You also need the ant command installed on your system, and you need git because you have to run a git clone to download the source for you to compile YACI. So I've already got YACI installed on my system, but let me show you some of the installation steps that are involved. First, you need to open up a terminal, and if you install it the way I did with the git clone, and that clones the YACI search server source code to your machine, and then once you run that, what you need to do is CD into the YACI search server directory that will now be on your system, and then you run ant clean all dist. This compiles YACI for you. And then after that, if you run an LS, you would see some files that it has created. Some of the more interesting ones are startYACI.sh and stopYACI.sh. So this is for starting and stopping the YACI server, the YACI daemon that is always running in the background. So if you wanted to start the YACI server, you could do period slash startYACI.sh. And that launches the YACI server so it's running right now. And then all I need to do is open a web browser. Web browser will be fine. And I'm going to go to localhost colon 8090. It runs on port 8090. And this is the YACI search engine from here. I could search for anything that I feel like searching for such as distro tube. And it is themeable. You can create your own custom themes as far as the coloring and everything. It has a few pre configured themes. It's got some light themes. It's got some dark themes. I'm using one of their standard dark themes here. You can change the layout. You can change how it sorts things, sorts by date. You can change language. All the settings that you expect to be in a search engine are pretty much here. There's also this administration tab at the very top. And this launches your admin panel. And from here, you get information about the YACI network, what's going on currently on the network. And this, by default, is the system status page that launches. If you go to peer to peer network, you get this really nice visual representation of the YACI peer to peer network. Somewhere in here, I am one of these peers that's currently doing something on the network. And this is a nice visual representation because a lot of people are confused about what it means to be decentralized and what it means to be peer to peer. So decentralization. So imagine if rather than relying on the proprietary software of a large corporation like Google that has the search engine, that instead you're using a search engine that's run by many private people across the world, such as you, me, thousands of other people that are also running the YACI server. That's what it means to be decentralized. No one person really controls anything. We all have equal parts in this thing. And that's kind of what peer to peer is as well. Peer to peer networking. That's a distributed application architecture that partitions task or workloads between all the peers. So right now you see all these names on the screen. These are peer names and all these peers, they all are equally privileged participants and what's going on on the network right now, right? They're all benefiting from being on the network. They're also all giving up a little bit of their system resources because typically peer to peer applications of what they do is these programs ask you to allocate some of your CPU or your disk storage or your network bandwidth, especially with internet applications. They want you to sacrifice a little bit of that system resources because there's no one company, right? There's no Google that has all their Google servers powering this thing. Know what powers this thing, you and me. So that's why you have to give up a little bit of storage space and a little bit of bandwidth to run something like YACI. Of course, the benefit of this is privacy, security. Nobody's tracking anything. You really can't track anything on YACI. That's one of the things if you read their frequently asked questions page on their website, nothing is trackable. There's really no one in control anyway to be collecting all of this information to begin with, looking at a little bit of the administration panel. If you go to the very first link here, use case and account, there are three different ways to set up YACI. Most of us are going to want to just do community based web search. That's all we want to do. We want a standard web search engine. YACI also includes the ability to create your own search portal for your own internal network or intranet. And that's this last option here, intranet indexing. Or you can also set it up as a search portal for your own web pages. You also have links to filters and blacklist. If you need to utilize those, if you go down here to a portal configuration and portal design under portal design is where you can change between about 10 or 12 pre built themes. I'm using dark. If you wanted to, you could define your own custom colors to create your own theme as well, but I'm pretty OK right now using the default dark theme. So what I would do if you're a window manager user, especially, you probably have some kind of auto start hook built into your window manager. I'm an X-mode ad for this video. And what I've done is I created a auto start hook for the YACI server to run that start YACI command. So it's always running in the background. And then I did a hot key for a search prompt for YACI. So if I type the right key binding, I can actually search for something in YACI. I'll search for the keyword Linux. And then it's going to open the search results for Linux news. I guess it's actually what I search for. I guess it remembers the history, the X-mode ad prompt. But anyway, so that's just a very quick way to quickly search YACI without even having a browser open for the search. For those of you using other window managers, you could very easily create a quick demon use script that would be searchable for YACI. Now, I have a pretty beefy machine, but you don't really need a fast machine to use YACI. It really doesn't take a lot of space to use it. And it is configurable because you can actually set the amount of megabytes that you want to spend for the cache and for the indexing. YACI respects user privacy because all passwords and cookie protected pages, they're excluded from indexing. There's no real way to browse the pages that are stored on a peerless machine. So you don't need to worry about people being able to access sensitive information that's maybe in your browser, your history or your law history or anything like that. So if you're concerned about privacy, I strongly urge you guys take a look at YACI, again, available on Windows, Mac and on Linux. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of the show. Devin Frangate, Torbenian, Mitchell, Akami, Archfitch, about 30. Chris, Chuck, Donnie, Dylan, Gregory, Lewis, Paul, Pick, VM, Scott and Willie. They are the producers of the show. They are my highest tier patrons over on Patreon. I also want to thank each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen, all these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because DistroTube is supported by you guys, the community. If it wasn't for you guys, I couldn't do what I do. If you're not currently subscribed to DistroTube on Patreon, please consider it. All right, peace.