Privacy
The Abstractinator · last updated 7 November 2026
No accounts, no advertising, no tracking cookies, and no IP addresses recorded. Nothing is sold or shared. The rest of this page is the detail.
What is recorded when you search
- The words you searched for, and the time.
- Whether the search came from the website or from an AI assistant.
- How long it took, how many results each database returned, whether the answer came from the cache, and the settings used (such as deep search).
- For searches made by an AI assistant: the name the assistant reports for itself, and a one-way hash of the connection's session id. The hash only groups requests from one conversation together; it cannot be traced back to a person.
This is used to see how the tool is used and where it falls short.
What is not recorded
- Your IP address.
- Your name, email, or any account — there are no accounts.
- Any browser fingerprint.
- API keys. If you enter a CORE or USPTO key, it stays in your browser session, is sent only to that provider, and is never written to disk or logged.
Where your search goes
To answer a search, the words are sent to Europe PMC, OpenAlex, ClinicalTrials.gov, NIH RePORTER and NSF Awards. Each of those services has its own privacy policy covering those requests. Preprints from bioRxiv and medRxiv are searched from a copy held on this server, so those searches never leave it.
Cloudflare
Traffic reaches the site through Cloudflare, which handles IP addresses in order to deliver and protect it, under Cloudflare's privacy policy. The site uses Cloudflare's aggregate traffic statistics, which involve no cookies. Cloudflare may set a short-lived security cookie to tell people apart from bots.
How long things are kept
- Search results are cached for 7 days so a repeat search is instant.
- Open-access articles read in full are cached for up to 30 days. These are published papers, not information about you.
- The search log described above is kept until it is deleted by hand.
Abstracts and copyright
Titles and abstracts come from the databases above and remain the copyright of their authors and publishers. They are shown so you can find papers, and every record links to the original. If you hold the rights to something shown here and want it removed, open an issue (or ask there for a private contact method) and it will be taken down.
Questions
Open an issue at github.com/ckangas2/abstractinator. The full source is public, so everything on this page can be checked against the code.