Terms of Use & Privacy Policy

Terms of Use

1. Nature of the Service

Informera is a business search engine designed to help users discover businesses, services, and providers. Informera is intended for business discovery, including businesses users may visit in person and businesses that may provide services to a user's location.

Informera does not crawl or index social networks, community forums, discussion boards, or other websites that are not business-entity websites. Informera is not a social network, forum, community platform, booking platform, review platform, or user-generated content platform.

Informera is provided as a free, modern alternative to traditional business directories and AI-based search engines for users who want to connect with businesses.

2. Public Business Websites and Crawling Practices

Informera indexes and displays information from publicly accessible business websites. By publishing a publicly accessible business website, website owners and operators generally understand that their website may be discovered, crawled, indexed, linked, previewed, and referenced by search engines, link preview systems, social sharing systems, and similar discovery technologies.

Website owners and operators are also generally expected to understand and use standard website administrative tools if they want to limit crawler access, including robots.txt directives, meta indexing directives, server configuration, firewall rules, and IP blocking.

Informera does not attempt to bypass reasonable technical access restrictions. If a business website is publicly accessible and does not restrict crawling or indexing, Informera may index and display relevant business information. This is functionally similar to a person sharing a link to a public business website on social media or a search engine displaying a business website in search results.

3. How Business Information Is Collected and Organized

Informera uses a proprietary crawler to discover publicly available business websites and extract business-related information. Informera categorizes businesses using manually approved topics and ranks results based on a growing number of internal factors.

Informera may collect and aggregate search data to improve categorization, understand business relevance, refine search quality, and better connect users with businesses.

4. Accuracy of Information

Orca Pings and the owners of Orca Pings make every reasonable effort to validate, categorize, and present business information in a useful way. However, Informera cannot manually verify every business listing, website, service, claim, contact method, image, or item of information.

Informera may contain information that is inaccurate, incomplete, outdated, unavailable, or incorrectly categorized. Informera does not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, timeliness, reliability, or suitability of any business information displayed on the website.

5. User Responsibility

Users are solely responsible for verifying any business they choose to contact, visit, hire, book, or otherwise engage with. Informera does not endorse, certify, guarantee, or recommend any listed business unless explicitly stated in writing.

Users should independently verify business legitimacy, pricing, availability, licensing, insurance, qualifications, service details, terms, contracts, and any other information relevant to their decision.

6. No Liability for Listed Businesses or Third-Party Websites

Orca Pings, Informera, and their owners, employees, contractors, and affiliates cannot be held liable for any incorrect, outdated, incomplete, misleading, or unavailable information displayed through Informera.

Orca Pings, Informera, and their owners, employees, contractors, and affiliates also cannot be held liable for the websites Informera lists, the actions or omissions of listed businesses, or any interaction, transaction, communication, appointment, booking, purchase, service, dispute, loss, damage, injury, or claim arising from a user's decision to contact or work with a listed business.

7. Third-Party Images, Favicons, Metadata, and Link Previews

Informera may display Open Graph images, favicons, page titles, descriptions, and other publicly available metadata to help business listings stand out and help users understand what a business offers.

Open Graph images, favicons, and similar assets remain the property of their respective owners. Informera references these assets in a manner similar to how search engines, browsers, messaging apps, and social media platforms render link previews for public websites.

Informera does not claim ownership over third-party images, favicons, or external website content. Informera does not host or permanently cache third-party images for ownership purposes. Informera may implement technical safeguards, including image suppression during high traffic or suspicious activity, to help prevent excessive requests to external websites.

8. Advertising

Informera does not require user accounts and does not bill users for use of the search service. Informera may offer advertising, sponsorship, or promotional placement options to businesses. Advertising does not guarantee business quality and does not create a warranty, endorsement, certification, or guarantee by Informera or Orca Pings.

9. Listing Updates and Removal Requests

Businesses may request corrections, updates, or removal of website information by contacting support@informera.ca. Informera may require reasonable verification before making changes and reserves the right to approve, deny, or prioritize requests at its discretion.

10. Acceptable Use

Users may not scrape, overload, reverse engineer, attack, interfere with, or misuse Informera. Users may not use automated systems to generate excessive queries, replicate the database, test security controls without permission, or create harmful traffic patterns.

Informera may restrict access, suppress features, block requests, rate limit traffic, or modify the service to protect its systems, users, and third-party websites.

11. Intellectual Property

The Informera platform, interface, software, search systems, categorization systems, data structures, and original content are owned by Orca Pings or its licensors. Users may not reproduce, redistribute, resell, or extract Informera data at scale without written permission.

12. No Warranty

Informera is provided "as is" and "as available" without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied. We do not guarantee uninterrupted service, error-free operation, search result accuracy, third-party website availability, or suitability for any particular purpose.

13. Limitation of Liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Orca Pings, Informera, and their owners, employees, contractors, and affiliates shall not be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, consequential, special, punitive, or exemplary damages arising from use of Informera or reliance on information displayed through Informera.

14. Jurisdiction

These Terms are governed by the laws of British Columbia and the applicable laws of Canada. Any dispute shall be handled in the courts of British Columbia, unless otherwise required by law.

15. Changes to These Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. Continued use of Informera after changes are posted means you accept the updated Terms.

Privacy Policy

1. Overview

Informera is designed to operate without user accounts. We do not require users to create profiles, log in, or pay for search access. Informera collects limited technical and usage information to operate the service, prevent abuse, and improve search quality.

2. Information We Collect

Informera may collect search and usage data, including search queries, selected filters, interaction patterns, approximate technical context, and aggregated usage trends. This helps us improve categorization, ranking, search relevance, and business discovery.

Informera may also collect technical data such as IP address, browser type, device information, request timing, and similar security or performance information. This information is used for rate limiting, abuse prevention, diagnostics, and service reliability.

Informera collects publicly available business information from business websites, including business names, website URLs, contact details, service descriptions, metadata, favicons, and Open Graph information where available.

3. Public Website Indexing

Informera indexes publicly accessible business websites using practices consistent with business directories, search engines, link preview tools, and social sharing systems. Website operators can use standard tools such as robots.txt, meta directives, server rules, firewalls, and IP blocking to manage crawler access.

4. How We Use Information

We use collected information to operate Informera, improve search accuracy, categorize businesses, refine ranking systems, prevent abuse, diagnose technical issues, monitor performance, and protect Informera and third-party websites from harmful traffic patterns.

5. Aggregated Search Data

Informera may collect and aggregate search data to better understand how users search for businesses and how businesses should be categorized. Aggregated search data may be used internally to improve the service and may inform future advertising, reporting, or product decisions.

6. Third-Party Images and External Resources

Informera may reference third-party Open Graph images, favicons, and metadata to display richer business listings. These resources are used similarly to search engine results and social media link previews. Informera may suppress images or external references during high traffic, suspicious activity, or technical conditions that could create excessive requests to third-party websites.

7. Cookies, Local Storage, and Browser Caching

Informera may use cookies, local storage, browser caching, or similar technologies to improve performance, reduce unnecessary requests, remember interface state, and help protect the service from abuse.

8. Data Sharing

Informera does not sell personal user profiles. Informera may use aggregated or anonymized information to improve the service, evaluate business categories, or develop advertising options. We may disclose information if required by law or necessary to protect the rights, safety, and security of Informera, Orca Pings, users, or third parties.

9. Business Listing Requests

Businesses may request updates, corrections, or removal of website information by contacting support@informera.ca. We may require verification before making changes.

10. Data Retention

Informera retains business listing data while it remains useful for business discovery. Aggregated search and technical data may be retained for analysis, security, and service improvement. Retention periods may vary based on operational needs, legal requirements, and security considerations.

11. Security

We use reasonable technical and administrative safeguards, including rate limiting, monitoring, traffic controls, and image suppression mechanisms. No system can be guaranteed completely secure.

12. Children

Informera is not directed to children and is intended for general business discovery purposes.

13. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. Updates will be posted on this page.

14. Contact

For privacy questions, listing changes, corrections, or removal requests, contact support@informera.ca.