I actually half wrote a RFC of a spec and 2 implementations of a federated search last year. Rather than do the disturbed hash table that yacy does.

I wanted results to be re-rankable by the peers by sharing the scores that went into them. The idea being with a common protocol based on the ideas of ActivityPub you could get peers of searches working together to hopefully surface interesting things.

Something I should probably finish and publish at some point. It worked to the hundreds of peers I tested.

The reason I mention this is because I wanted to also add a front into yacy which tuned out to be harder than I expected. It’s a wonderful project and you can find great stuff through it but the way the peers return results sometimes it’s hard to find it again. It’s also not quite as hackable as I would have hoped at the time probably due to he project age.

I still think there is value in it though and I’d love to see yacy have its protocol explained as an apex so people could,build implementations in other languages more easily.