Acceptable Use Policy

What freesea is for

freesea exists so an agent can look something up on behalf of the person it is helping, and hand that person a useful answer. Everything below follows from that.

Don't resell or repackage

• Do not resell, sublicense, or redistribute results, whether raw or reformatted.
• Do not put freesea behind your own search API, proxy or product and offer it as your own.
• Do not build a competing index out of what freesea returns, or store results in bulk for that purpose.

Don't break the funding model

Sponsored results are how this service is free. We label them honestly, we never reorder organic results for them, and we ask one thing in return: don't defeat them.

• Do not strip, hide or alter the sponsored label, the disclosure text, or an incentive attached to a sponsored result before passing it on.
• Do not present a sponsored result while removing the fact that it is sponsored.
• Do not rewrite, unwrap or replace the links we return so that the traffic cannot be attributed.
• Do not generate clicks that no person made, or otherwise manufacture activity on sponsored links.

Don't abuse the limits

• One account per person or organisation. Do not create multiple accounts, or spread keys across identities, to exceed the free limits.
• Do not use the service as a bulk data source — crawling, mirroring, or harvesting at a scale unrelated to answering individual questions.
• Do not attempt to bypass rate limiting, the usage budget, or any other control.

Don't point it at harm

• No illegal activity, and nothing that infringes someone else's rights.
• No harassment, stalking, or building profiles of specific private individuals.
• No use of /v1/fetch to reach systems you are not authorised to access, or to probe private infrastructure. Requests that resolve to private network addresses are refused, and attempting to defeat that is a breach of this policy.
• Nothing that endangers the service itself — no attempts to disrupt, overload or compromise it.

Enforcement

We may suspend or terminate any account at any time, for any reason or none, as set out in the Terms of Service. Breach of this policy is the most common reason we will.

If you think an enforcement decision was wrong, write to alon@steelworks.software and we will look at it.

Reporting abuse

If you are a site operator and freesea is behaving badly toward you — our fetcher identifies itself as freesea-fetch/1.0 — tell us at alon@steelworks.software and we will act on it.