Terms of Service

Effective Date: May 21, 2026  •  Last Updated: June 11, 2026

1. Acceptance of Terms

By accessing or using Haunted Lineage (the "Service"), you agree to be bound by these Terms of Service. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

The Service is operated by Haunted Lineage LLC (d/b/a Haunted Lineage), a company formed in Missouri.

2. Age Restriction & Minors

Consistent with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), this Service is not directed to children under the age of 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from minors under 13. If you are under 13, do not use this Service or submit any information through it. If we become aware that we have inadvertently collected information from a child under 13, we will take steps to delete that information as promptly as reasonably possible. Parents or guardians who believe their child has provided us with personal information may contact us at privacyandpolicy@hauntedlineage.com to request deletion.

3. Acceptable Use

You may use this Service to search publicly indexed content, submit site URLs for crawl consideration, and access search result features.

You must not:

• Attempt to bypass rate limits, abuse protections, or safeguards
• Overburden infrastructure with malicious or excessive automated requests
• Submit spam, malware, unauthorized content, or materially off-topic URLs
• Attempt unauthorized access to admin systems, internal APIs, or databases
• Manipulate rankings via click fraud, feedback abuse, or artificial schemes
• Use the Service for unlawful activity

4. Enforcement & Termination

We reserve the right to restrict or terminate access for violations of these Terms or at our discretion.

At our sole discretion and without prior notice, we may also suspend, rate-limit, or permanently terminate access to the Service for any user or entity that violates these Terms, engages in abuse or manipulation of the Service, or whose conduct we determine to be harmful to the integrity of the platform, its users, or its indexed content. We are not obligated to provide a reason for any such action. Removal of access does not limit any other remedies available to us under applicable law.

5. Content Curation & Indexing Standards

To preserve index quality and topic relevance, administrators may apply filters, throttling, reclassification, rejection, or removal decisions on submitted or discovered content.

6. Site Submission & Submitted Content

1. You represent and warrant that you own or possess the necessary authorized rights to submit the site URL for index consideration
2. You grant Haunted Lineage a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to crawl, index, store, analyze, and display snippets or vector embeddings of publicly available content on the submitted site for search and archival purposes
3. You agree to indemnify and hold harmless Haunted Lineage against any third-party claims, liabilities, or damages arising directly from your submission or any unauthorized content contained therein
4. We may accept, delay, prioritize, reject, or remove submitted URLs at our sole discretion

7. Search Results & Accuracy

Results are generated algorithmically using ranking signals and semantic relevance systems. We do not guarantee completeness, accuracy, timeliness, or fitness for a particular purpose.

8. AI-Generated Descriptions & Summaries

Some indexed results may include automatically generated descriptions or summaries from self-hosted AI systems. These may contain errors and are provided for informational convenience only.

9. Crawling, Indexing & Bot Conduct

Our crawler targets publicly accessible web content and follows a defined discovery and indexing process. This section covers how we crawl, what we index, and how site owners can opt out.

Crawling Process:

1. We prioritize XML sitemaps when available for discovery and refresh scheduling
2. We honor robots.txt Disallow rules and Crawl-delay directives
3. We identify ourselves honestly with our public user-agent and do not disguise crawl traffic
4. Our crawler currently identifies as: HauntedLineageGhostCrawler/1.0 (+https://search.hauntedlineage.com/bot-info)
5. We aim to avoid putting excessive load on any single server by applying per-domain throttling

Indexing Rules:

• We index publicly accessible pages, documents, and media relevant to our research focus
• We do not crawl authenticated areas, private pages, forms, or interactive flows that require a login
• We may use headless browser rendering only when standard fetches cannot retrieve usable content
• We deduplicate content using hash, SimHash, and vector similarity checks before storing results
• We respect noindex and nofollow signals when present

Opt-Out and Removal:

• Site owners may request exclusion by using robots.txt, adding noindex, contacting us directly, or reviewing implementation details on our bot-info page
• Verified rights holders may request removal of specific URLs or entire domains from the index
• Exclusion and removal requests are handled on the next crawl pass or as otherwise operationally feasible

Removal Request Workflow:

1. Send the exact URL(s) or domain(s) and requested action to crawler@hauntedlineage.com
2. Include verification details when making rights-holder or domain-owner claims; we may respond with additional requests or steps to confirm ownership
3. Validated requests are queued for suppression and reflected on the next crawl/index cycle, with urgent abuse/security requests prioritized

10. Intellectual Property

• Search snippets are excerpts of third-party content used for indexing/search purposes
• Indexed content remains the intellectual property of its respective owners
• The Service software, ranking systems, and infrastructure are proprietary

11. Service Availability

The Service is provided "as is" and "as available." We do not guarantee uninterrupted uptime, continuous availability, or uninterrupted freshness of indexed results.

To support performance and operational stability, the Service uses server-side caching layers including Memcached and PHP OPcache.

12. Disclaimer of Warranties

To the fullest extent permitted by law, the Service is provided without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement.

13. Limitation of Liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Haunted Lineage is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, or consequential damages arising from use of, or inability to use, the Service.

14. Modifications

We may update these Terms of Service (and our Privacy Policy) at any time. While we will make reasonable efforts to communicate material changes - such as updating the Effective Date, posting a notice on the Service, or sending a notification where feasible - we make no guarantee as to the method, timing, or delivery of any such notification. Your continued use of the Service following any update constitutes your acceptance of the revised terms. We encourage users to review this page periodically.

15. Governing Law

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Missouri, United States, without regard to conflict of law principles.

Any dispute, claim, or controversy arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service shall be brought exclusively in the state or federal courts located in the State of Missouri, and you consent to the personal jurisdiction and venue of those courts.

16. User Accounts and Authenticated Features

We offer user accounts enabling authenticated features, including saved searches, curated results, and personal profile management. If you create an account, you are responsible for maintaining credential confidentiality and all activities occurring under your account.

We reserve the right to suspend, rate-limit, or terminate accounts at our discretion if we detect abuse, credential sharing, automated scraping via user sessions, or violations of acceptable use terms.

17. Contact

Legal operator: Haunted Lineage LLC (d/b/a Haunted Lineage) (formed in Missouri).

For crawl/index issues, contact: crawler@hauntedlineage.com

For policy or privacy requests, contact: privacyandpolicy@hauntedlineage.com

For DMCA notices, contact: dmca@hauntedlineage.com