You may run yacy on whonix-workstation over TOR. For this you are to install privoxy. Set yacy to use external (optional) proxy and set it to 127.0.0.1 and port 8118. Then sudo vi /etc/privoxy/config and set privoxy to use socks5 of whonix-gateway. You may use other text editor instead of vi. Put the following line into config file:
forward-socks5 / 192.168.0.10:9112 .
Save and exit the text editor.
Now yacy will run via a special dedicated socks5 port with its own ip.
Also go to http://127.0.0.1:8090/ConfigPortal.html and choose False option to get more search results.
Give at least 1500 Ram to whonix-workstation. The more, the better.
Also you may set the limit for crawled files size as 200000. To crawl a webpage or several webpages of a site to add it/them to index, chose Load Web Pages, Crawler and “load only files in a sub-path of given url” to avoid crawling pages from other websites. Also set no more than option and put 10-100 pages. No need to crawl entire sites. The main page and several most interesting pages will do.
If you use Firefox, you should have Allow pages to use their own colors switched on in Firefox settings. Otherwise you won’t see any connections with peers on Peer-to-peer Network page.
To avoid slow yacy work your memory cache should be set to true in firefox about:config. Also in Firefox preferences set Overide automatic cache management to ON and put 180-200 m.
Keep in mind that gugle, yohu and other major search engines filter many political results they don’t like. That’s where yacy stands out.
To have decent speed for yacy you have to have a powerful CPU. The more powerful - the better. The more pages are crawled into your index, the more powerful CPU and more RAM you will need. If running whonix on a USB stick, keep yacy on another USB. Otherwise you may shorten the life of your whonix usb stick and damage it sooner because there is always the risk that yacy may freeze your OS when it’s used on slow storage media, or with little ram, or with a weak CPU.
Another solution is to create an encrypted container on the HDD and put yacy into it but the folder with indexes and crawled pages should be on a second usb stick, so that you could unplug your whonix USB stick and yacy USB stick and hide them when your PC is grabbed by the adversaries. Thus they get the container but without your indexes and crawled pages. If anyone knows how to implement this or has a better solution of HDD use, post a reply with your guidelines.
Most people underestimate the importance of a decentralized search engine. Use yacy and spread information about it.