yacybot

YaCyBot is the web crawler for the open-source, peer-to-peer search engine YaCy. It is a decentralized crawler, meaning that instances of the bot are run by individual participants in the YaCy network from all over the world. The bot's purpose is to scan websites to gather information for YaCy's shared search index. It identifies itself in logs with a user-agent string like yacybot (...) http://yacy.net/bot.html, which includes details about the specific node that is crawling.

YaCyBot is crawling your site to collect and index its content for the YaCy distributed search engine. Because the network is decentralized, crawling patterns can vary significantly. The bot may visit more frequently if your site is relevant to the interests of the YaCy community. Its crawling is generally authorized as part of a legitimate search indexing activity, and the bot is designed to respect standard web protocols.

The purpose of YaCyBot is to support the YaCy search engine, which offers a decentralized alternative to the major search engines. The data it collects is used to build a search index that is not controlled by a single corporation, and whose results are not influenced by commercial algorithms. For website owners, being indexed by YaCyBot provides visibility to users who prefer privacy-focused, decentralized search options. The distributed nature of the index can also mean that it includes content that mainstream search engines might not prioritize.

To prevent YaCyBot from accessing your website, you can add a specific disallow rule to your robots.txt file. This is the standard method for managing access for web crawlers.

To block this bot, add the following lines to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: yacybot
Disallow: /