PRIVACY

Useful telemetry.
Limited retention.

ssearch records operational data to run the service, improve ranking, understand aggregate demand, and measure result delivery. Current business reporting is designed around aggregate metrics rather than exposing raw requester IP addresses.

What search telemetry includes

For search requests, ssearch can record the submitted query, normalized query text, request timing, backend mode, returned result metadata, response status, approximate network geography, and whether a result selection was recorded.

Authentication secrets, cookies, API keys, passwords, bearer tokens, and other recognized credential fields are omitted from telemetry capture.

Website analytics

ssearch uses a self-hosted instance of GoatCounter to understand how the public website is discovered and used. Website analytics can include the page path, referring site, campaign parameters, browser and device class, screen size, and approximate location. The analytics service is operated by ssearch and is isolated from the search index and raw search-query telemetry.

The website analytics configuration does not use advertising cookies, advertising identifiers, or cross-site profiles. GoatCounter uses privacy-oriented aggregate reporting by default; individual pageview storage is not enabled for this deployment.

Network location

The service can use the calling network IP address to determine approximate country, region, and city locally using an IP geolocation database. Raw request IP records are kept separately from search-event records and are scheduled for deletion after 30 days.

Search-event retention

Raw operational search-event records are retained for up to 180 days by default. Aggregate trend and reporting data may be retained longer when it no longer needs the raw request IP record. Retention settings may be shortened as the product matures.

Page fetches

Readable page text returned by the page-fetch tool is not stored in the general request-body telemetry capture. Pages that enter the crawler corpus are handled separately as search-index content.

Business reporting

Planned business reporting is designed around aggregate search demand, impressions, and recorded selections. Raw requester IP addresses are not intended to be exposed to business customers.

Sensitive trend handling

Some obvious identifiers and sensitive query topics are excluded from monetizable public trend aggregation. The underlying service request may still be retained temporarily as operational telemetry under the retention rules above.

Questions

This page describes the current technical behavior of the service. Product, legal, and retention details may be refined before paid business reporting launches.