YaCy is a decentralized DIY search engine.

Since all IPFS gateways serve up the same data, I decided to point ipfs.io to my local gateway that runs with my YaCy node.

In my /etc/hosts, I simply added 127.0.0.1 ipfs.io and in my /etc/nginx/conf.d/ I made an ipfs-io.conf with the following inside,

server {
   listen 80;

   server_name ipfs.io;

   location / {
      proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
      proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080/;
      proxy_buffering off;
      proxy_http_version 1.1;
      proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
      proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
   }
}

Now, on that machine, any requests to ipfs.io should go to my local gateway.

Indexing IPFS content via YaCy becomes incredibly fast for my pinned content now that it's local.

The URL should still be valid for anyone searching through YaCy (except it starts off HTTP instead of HTTPS). They should ideally visit through their own gateway anyway and only use it as a reference.

If you've never used YaCy before, it's maybe worth warning you that if you don't want to aggregate other people's data you need to turn some default settings off.

This method at least partially answers this thread by u/tweezed.

This post also saw the possible benefit of YaCy IPFS, but doesn't change the gateway to a localhost.

Idk how many people use YaCy, but the ones that do will have my public files indexed.

tl;dr: YaCy makes a nice DIY search engine for IPFS stuff. You can add your own content locally without actually using the public gateways.