Not just a word in the tagline. Here's what it actually means.
Yew Search is self-hosted: Postgres, the search index, and the application itself run on hardware you control - a homelab server, a Raspberry Pi, whatever you choose. We don't operate a copy of your instance, we don't have access to it, and your content doesn't pass through anything we run, by default.
Vector search and summarization need a model to run - that's unavoidable. You choose what that model is. Point it at a local model (Ollama) and nothing leaves your server. Point it at a hosted provider (OpenAI, Voyage, Google, Mistral, or similar) instead, and the relevant content gets sent to that provider the same way it would for any other product built on their API - because you configured it that way, not as a default, and not silently.
The software you self-host doesn't phone home, doesn't report usage analytics about you, and doesn't include any tracking of what you search or what it returns.
This marketing site (the one you're reading right now, not your self-hosted instance) uses a self-hosted analytics tool (Matomo) that we run ourselves, to understand site traffic. It isn't a third-party ad or tracking network, and it has nothing to do with your Yew instance or your data. See our Privacy Policy for the full, formal version of this page.