Guides
Published guidance
Finished original guides only. Product teasers and generic SEO outlines are not listed here.
Available now
- How Oernoe Search worksHow Search discovers, indexes, and ranks pages without using search history for advertising profiles.Open
- Search queries and Google adsWhere ads appear on www.oernoe.com, and why that is not the same as Search selling queries.Open
- Which Oernoe hostname does whatwww is the publisher. Search, Account, Health, Chat, AI, Docs, Drive, and Tracker are other hosts.Open
- Using an Oernoe accountCreate, recover, and close an account, and which screens never show ads.Open
- How a privacy request is handledWhat to send, what an export contains, and what Search cannot pull down for you.Open
- What we publishWhat stays in the public index after the low value content review, and what does not.Open
- Corrections we have already madeZero tracking, the Mail page, generic SEO URLs, robots.txt, and overlapping essays.Open
How to use this list
Start with How Search works if you want ranking. Start with Search queries and Google ads if you are here because of AdSense. Start with Which hostname does what if you mixed up www and search.oernoe.com. Start with Using an account if you need the product. Start with How a privacy request is handled if you want an export or a deletion. What we publish is the policy for this website as a publisher. Corrections is the public list of copy we already took down or rewrote.
Step-by-step screens live on How-To. Legal detail lives on Privacy, Cookies, and Terms. If a guide disagrees with those, the legal page wins until we fix the guide.
What counts as a guide here
A guide on this site explains something about Oernoe that we can verify from the inside: how our own crawler behaves, what our own account system does, where advertising sits on our own pages. That is a deliberately narrow definition. There is no shortage of general writing about how search engines work in the abstract, and adding another rewrite of it would give a reader nothing they could not get from a hundred other sites.
The list is short because it only contains finished work. Earlier versions of this section carried outlines for guides that had not been written, teasers for products that had not shipped, and generic search-engine explainers with no Oernoe content in them. Those were removed rather than padded out. A short list of pages worth reading is more useful than a twenty-item list where sixteen entries waste your time.
How these are kept current
Guides describe software that changes, so they go stale. When a product behaviour changes, the guide that describes it is updated in the same week or it gets a note saying which part is now out of date. If a guide describes a feature that has been withdrawn, the guide comes down. We would rather have a gap in this list than an entry that confidently describes a screen you will not find.
Corrections is not a changelog of every CSS tweak. It is the list of public claims that were wrong: zero tracking as a site-wide promise, Mail as a product you could join, generic SEO journal URLs, a robots.txt that missed live routes, and overlapping privacy essays. If you only have time for one guide besides Search and ads, read that one. It is the fastest way to see whether we will admit a mistake.
If a guide is wrong, or if there is something about Oernoe you expected to find here and did not, write to hello@oernoe.com. Requests do influence what gets written next, and a specific question is far more useful than a topic.