About Yigo

Yigo is a free search engine for 3D printable models. Describe what you need in plain words, like “cable organizer for desk” or “flexible articulated animal”, and Yigo finds matching models across several model sites.

Yigo is a directory, not a host. Every result links straight to the model’s page on the site that publishes it, where you view, download or buy it. Downloads, likes and designer rewards all stay with the original site.

Where results come from

Yigo currently indexes thousands of models:

• Thingiverseofficial API
• Cults3Dofficial API
• Creality Cloudpublic sitemap and page previews

We only add a site once we can do it the way that site allows: through its official API, or by crawling pages its robots.txt permits. Sites that block automated access are left out until they give us permission.

How search works

Yigo finds models the way classic search engines do, with no AI. It matches your words by their roots, so “dragons” also finds “dragon”, and knows common alternatives, such as “headset” for “headphones”. Rare words count for more than common ones, so in “articulated skeleton frog” it’s the frogs that matter, not every articulated model. Results with all your words, close together in the title, rank highest; results missing the word that matters most are left out rather than padding the page. Small typos are corrected automatically, and you can show only free or only paid models.

Clicking a result opens its Preview: a larger look at it, with similar models from Yigo. It shows only what the result already shows (image, title, tags), so the full photo gallery, description, files and comments stay on the model’s own site. Every result and every Preview has an Open in … button that goes straight there, and a Copy link button for its address.

You don’t have to search to find something. The home page shows the most popular models at a glance (or the newest), the Feed shows one model per screen to scroll through, and the star on any model saves it to your Favorites, kept in your own browser. Search results can be ordered by best match, most popular, newest or oldest.

The Convert page turns 3D files into the format you need (STL or 3MF for printing, GLB, OBJ, FBX and more), all in your browser, with nothing uploaded.

As you use Yigo, it learns which kinds of models you like from what you search, open, save and look at for longer. It uses that to pick your feed and the home page’s For you, and to move search results you’ll probably prefer up a little. This happens in your own browser and is never sent to us. You can see what it has learned, delete it or turn it off on the Favorites page (how it works).

For site owners and designers

Our crawler, YigoBot, is built to be a good guest:

• It identifies itself on every request:
  Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YigoBot/1.0; +https://yigo.kvchub.com)
• It proves it: every request is signed with YigoBot’s key (Web Bot Auth), and the key is published at https://yigo.kvchub.com/.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory, so anyone can check that a request really comes from YigoBot.
• It obeys robots.txt, including Crawl-delay, and makes at most one request per second to any site.
• It reads only public pages, and only their metadata: the title, tags, link and preview-image link. It never downloads model files or collects user data.
• Images load from your own servers. Every result has an “Open in …” button that goes straight to your page, and Yigo’s Preview shows only the result’s own image, title and tags.
• About once a week it checks that each model is still there, and removes models that have been deleted or made private, so Yigo never sends people to missing pages.
• If a site’s bot protection challenges it, YigoBot stops. It never tries to get around a block.

To keep YigoBot off your site entirely, add this to your robots.txt:

User-agent: YigoBot
Disallow: /

Want a model removed, or want us to include your site? Email yigo@kvchub.com with the model links or your request. Removed models are also blocked from being added again.

Privacy

Yigo has no accounts, no ads, no cookies for visitors and no tracking. It keeps only anonymous daily totals and, for 90 days, the words people search for, and it may show popular searches on the home page as “Trending”. The privacy policy explains everything, and the terms of use set out the rules for using Yigo.

Contact

For anything else, email yigo@kvchub.com.