Terms of Use

These terms govern your use of tombelfort.com, a research publication written and operated by Tom Belfort. By reading the site you accept them. They are written to be understood without counsel, and where they are silent the ordinary rules of copyright and fair dealing apply.

Copyright and quotation

All monographs, research notes, formulas as typeset, figures, the calculator and the site’s design are the copyright of Tom Belfort unless otherwise stated. Patent text quoted or paraphrased remains in the public record and is cited by number. You may quote passages for criticism, review, teaching or research with attribution to the author alongside a direct citation URL. Readers may not republish a monograph in full, syndicate it, translate it for publication, or incorporate it into a commercial training corpus, product or dataset without written permission from [email protected]. Permission for academic and non-commercial reuse is normally granted promptly.11The underlying ideas, patents, equations and attribute names are not owned by anyone here and may be used freely. What is protected is the expression: the prose, the structure and the figures.

Status of models and the calculator

Several monographs present working models of ranking mechanisms, and the front page hosts an interactive Link Equity and Outdegree Decay Calculator. These are pedagogical instruments. They are built from published mathematics, patent claims and documented schema, and they are labelled as simplified wherever they are not verbatim from a primary source. They do not reproduce any search engine’s production scoring system and are not represented as doing so. Outputs from the calculator are illustrative and should not be relied upon as predictions of ranking, traffic or revenue.

No professional relationship

Reading the site, writing to the editorial address or submitting a correction does not create an advisory, consulting, fiduciary or legal relationship with the author. Advisory engagements exist only under a separate written agreement that sets out scope, confidentiality and fees. Nothing on the site is legal, financial or regulatory advice, and decisions about your own websites, domains and content remain yours.

Accuracy and revisions

The lab holds itself to the editorial standards described on the About page, and corrects errors in place with a visible revision date. Even so, the site is provided as is, without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, fitness for a particular purpose or non-infringement. Search systems change continuously; a mechanism accurately described on its publication date may have been altered since. To the fullest extent permitted by law, the author is not liable for any loss or damage arising from reliance on the site’s contents, including loss of rankings, traffic, revenue or data.

Links to other sites

Monographs link to patents, public documentation, archives and occasionally third-party research. Those destinations are not controlled by the lab, and a link is a citation rather than an endorsement of everything at the destination. The lab does not sell, exchange or accept payment for outbound links, consistent with the principles the monographs describe.

Crawlers, scraping and automated access

The site publishes a robots.txt and a sitemap.xml, and welcomes well-behaved crawlers, including search engines and archival services, at reasonable request rates. Automated access that ignores the robots file, imposes unreasonable load, or is undertaken to bulk-copy the monographs for republication or model training is prohibited. The lab reserves the right to block abusive user agents and address ranges without notice.

Correspondence

By sending a correction, replication note or inquiry to the editorial address you grant the lab permission to act on it, including by revising a monograph, and to credit you in the form you specify or, absent specification, anonymously. You confirm that anything you send is yours to share and does not breach a confidentiality obligation to a third party.

Governing law

These terms fall under New York statutory jurisdiction, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules, and any dispute that cannot be resolved by correspondence is subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the state and federal courts sitting in New York County. If you access the site from the European Union, nothing in these terms limits rights you hold under mandatory consumer or data-protection law in your country of residence.

Changes

These terms may be revised from time to time. The revision date at the top of the page is authoritative, and material changes are noted in the front-page research log. Continued use of the site after a revision constitutes acceptance of the revised terms.

Questions about these terms go to [email protected].