scary red spider

Here comes our creepy crawler to take your content so we can take your users!

Oh, wait, we don't actually have one of those! How we operate is very different from traditional web search engines. Instead of making copies of sites so that we can search them on our servers, we use the 🔍 search that most sites themselves provide to best connect visitors directly to available content.

We support automatic search discovery via the OpenSearch specification. We look for it in the <head> of some source URL we are given (usually your site's main page); no other indexing is done. While we can manually enter links to search pages we find as we surf the web, we generally will not bother doing that unless a site also supports some form of suggestion/results API similar to what OpenSearch provides. Please provide previews people prefer.

We do also provide services like calendaRSS, which make use of site-supported news/podcast feeds via RSS, Atom, or other related PubSub notification technologies. As with OpenSearch, those links are usually found in the <head> of a source page. We may reload the feed URL to get updates, done on an optimized schedule, and usually not more frequently than every 4 hours. By contrast, we do not automatically reload your main page at all.

So, fundamentally, what we do is rank sites based on how good their search results are. Sadly, some people are not honest regarding what their site offers visitors. Our curation process does not favor such sites. Your SEO budget is best spent on optimizing your site's own search engine.