How Toweya works

A short explanation for website owners: what Toweya does with your site, what it needs, and what you notice of it.

Federated search, in short

An ordinary search engine copies as much of the web as it can into one index, and searches that copy. Toweya keeps no copy. When someone searches, Toweya picks the websites most likely to know the answer and asks each of them at the same moment, through the site's own search. A round asks up to a hundred sites; if they find too little, Toweya asks the next ones.

The searcher sees the answers as they come in, grouped by kind of site: news, blogs, forums, reference works, shopping and more.

What Toweya needs from your site

• A search function on your public site.
• Results Toweya can read: through a supported platform, or as an RSS or Atom feed.
• Different results for different words, and none for a word that doesn't exist.
• Access for ToweyaBot, which says who it is and paces its requests.

How your site joins Toweya

1. Toweya finds your site in public lists and directories, or you add it yourself in the portal.
2. ToweyaBot checks whether your search works, with a few ordinary words and one made-up word.
3. If it does, Toweya looks at the site's content and safety. A person looks at samples and at reports.
4. Then your site takes part in search.

What you notice of Toweya

A search sent to your site is an ordinary request to your search address, from ToweyaBot. Toweya spreads its requests and sends only a few at once to the same server. Visitors who click a result arrive with toweya.com as the referrer, so you can see them in your own statistics.

Toweya keeps no copy of your pages: only measurements such as response time and number of results, and words from result titles, to know what your site is about.

What Toweya doesn't include

Toweya only searches websites it has admitted. Adult content, gambling, malware and phishing, piracy, hate content, and sales of drugs or weapons are kept out.