Privacy Policy

What is collected

To run the service and improve results, Codanya records:

• Search queries. The words you search for, the number of results returned, and how long the search took. These are stored so popular searches can power suggestions and so slow or empty queries can be improved. They are not tied to your identity.
• Standard server logs. Like any website, the server may briefly record technical details of a request — such as an IP address, the time, and your browser's user-agent — for security and to keep the service running. These logs are not used to build a profile of you.

What is not collected

• No account is needed to search, so no name, email or password is asked for.
• No advertising cookie, and no advertising or social-media trackers on any page.
• No selling or sharing of search data with third parties.
• No cross-site profile of your browsing, and none behind the ads either — see Advertising.
• No behavioural or interest-based ad targeting, and no participation in the browser APIs built for it.

Approximate location

Codanya works out an approximate country for your visit. Your IP address is resolved to a country — either by the network that delivers this site or by a lookup against a local database on our own servers — and only the resulting two-letter country code is used. That code shows your country in the footer and, in time, makes search results more relevant to your region.

Codanya receives the country, not a precise location, and does not build a history of where you have been. Where no country is available — for example on a local or direct connection — your browser's own timezone or language setting is used as a fallback, worked out on your device.

Cookies

Codanya uses cookies only where they are needed: a session cookie if you sign in to an account area, and a cookie remembering your SafeSearch preference. There are no advertising or analytics cookies, and the ad server sets none at all.

Advertising

Codanya sells advertising, and some of what you see is paid for. Every paid result and every ad is labelled Sponsored or Ad. This section is what that label links to.

What decides which ad you see

The words you just searched for, or the page the ad is on — and, at the level of a country and a device type, roughly where and on what you are reading. That is the whole list. An advertiser can ask to reach people searching for "running shoes", or people reading a page about running, in the United Kingdom, on a phone. They cannot ask to reach you.

What is not used, and could not be

• No advertising cookie or identifier. The ad server sets nothing in your browser and reads nothing from it. There is no id to attach a history to, which is why the next item is structural rather than a promise.
• No profile, and no history across sites or searches. Two people reading the same page get the same ad. Nothing about your previous searches or previous pages is available to the auction.
• No advertising data sold or shared. Advertisers get counts — impressions, clicks, country, device — never anything about an individual.
• No frequency capping. A consequence of the above rather than an oversight: recognising that you have already seen an ad would require exactly the identifier we do not set. You may see the same ad twice.

What is recorded when an ad is shown

A counter is incremented: how many times an ad was shown and clicked, on which day and hour, in which country, on which class of device. These are totals, not events — there is no row anywhere describing your visit.

When an ad is clicked, one row is written so the click can be billed exactly once and checked for fraud. It holds the ad, the price, the country, the device, and your IP address only as a salted one-way hash — enough to notice the same visitor clicking the same ad twenty times in an hour, never enough to say who they are. Those rows are deleted after 90 days.

Ads on other people's websites

Codanya also serves ads on other publishers' sites. Those ads are chosen from the content of the page they are on, looked up in this engine's own index — not from anything about the visitor. Each one renders inside a sandboxed frame, so the advertiser's content cannot read the page around it, its cookies or its storage, and cannot run scripts at all.

Clicking an ad

An ad click goes through Codanya before reaching the advertiser, because the click is what the advertiser pays for and it has to be counted before you leave. The advertiser sees that the visit came from Codanya; they do not receive your search. This is the one place where a link is redirected — ordinary search results are never routed through us, deliberately.

Other sites

Search results link out to websites that Codanya does not control. Once you follow a link, the privacy practices of that site apply, not this one.

Maps and directions

The Maps vertical searches for places, shows them on a map, and can plan a route between two points. To do that, three kinds of data leave your device for Codanya's own server, which forwards them to open-data providers and returns only the result:

• Place queries. The words you type into the maps search or the directions "from"/"to" boxes are sent to Photon (an OpenStreetMap-based geocoder) to be turned into coordinates. They are not tied to your identity.
• Route endpoints. The start and end of a route, as coordinates, are sent to OpenRouteService to calculate directions. The place names you typed stay on Codanya's server; only the coordinates are forwarded.
• Your precise location, only if you ask. The "Use my location" button asks your browser for a single position fix. The coordinate stays in your browser to fill the route's start point; it is not stored. The button is the only thing on this site that can request a precise location, and it never fires without a click.

The map itself is drawn from OpenFreeMap tiles and OpenStreetMap data, which carry their own attribution. When satellite view is turned on, aerial imagery tiles are loaded directly from the configured provider (Esri World Imagery by default) and carry a separate attribution. Geocoder and routing responses are cached on Codanya's server to speed up repeated lookups; the cache holds the results, not your identity.

Changes

This policy may change as Codanya grows. Any update will be posted on this page with a new "last updated" date.