Help

First, read our about page. Other than that, here are a few tips on how to search.

You can type plain questions or phrases, like what are good ambient music sites? Litter Layer will pull out the important keywords before searching.

Word endings are normalized automatically, so history, histories, and historical tend to match the same pages.

Optional accounts let you save bookmarks to your email login. Without an account, bookmarks still work, but are stored per browser versus a user account.

You may use the search operators AND, OR, NOT. For example, if you want to find cats but not orange, you would type cats NOT orange.

If you are logged in, you can also set automatic content filters (Shops, Adult, Politics) on your Account settings page to exclude related results from every search without typing NOT operators.

Instead of searching website titles, descriptions, and URLs (the default), you may search by tag. Type in tag:cats. If the tag has more than one word, you must use quotes. So, tag:"orange cats".

You may also search a tag with a keyword (e.g. tag:cats orange or tag:"orange cats" funny).

Tag search matches any indexed URL that has tags in the database. Not every page has tags — they may come from page metadata, a site's patu.txt file, or other sources. See the about page for patu.txt format.

On the search results page, you can enable Federated search to combine this site's index with approved partner nodes. Partner nodes are queried once per search; network results can continue on later pages when you click “Load more results,” until that search's federated pool is exhausted. After that, additional pages use the hub index only. Partner sites must be approved by an administrator before they participate.

News

The News page shows headlines from RSS feeds curated by site administrators. Articles link to the original publisher; images and excerpts appear when the feed provides them.

Contributing to the Litter Layer Federation

If you want to contribute to the Litter Layer Federation, read Join the Federation. That page explains how to publish a descriptor file, implement the search API, register your node, and send heartbeats. The starter pack also includes an optional on-site search widget and auto-crawler so node operators can search their own site and keep sites.json updated without a cron job. A live example descriptor is available at /.well-known/litterlayer.json on this site. Registration is public; each node is reviewed before it goes live.

For help unrelated to the above, you may email [email protected].