Site Search Terms of Service

The following terms & conditions govern the use of Site Search. By accepting these terms & conditions, completing the registration process, submitting a website domain for indexing, or otherwise using the service in accordance with these terms, you acknowledge that you agree to be bound by these terms of service which leads to a legal agreement ("contract") between you and loxal. When registering, legal entities must name a legally competent natural person fully authorized to represent that entity.

1. Definitions

The "contract" refers to the terms, conditions, and notices contained in these Terms of Service, our (Privacy Policy, our Data Processing Agreement), and any other individual agreements between us and the client. "Site Search" is a trademark of loxal GmbH ("loxal"), a limited liability company headquartered at Ismaninger Str. 40, 81675 Munich, Germany. The Site Search service is offered and operated through the URL search.loxal.net on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) basis. "Service" refers to the software and services provided by loxal under the Site Search name, including any upgrades and updates. "Clients," "you" and "your" refer to the individual, company, or organization using the service and party to a legal agreement with loxal. "Account" represents your access to Site Search and gives you access to each feature of the service, including index and search settings, dashboard, analytics, and subscription plans, collectively referred to as the "control panel." Natural persons must be fully competent to register an account. "Website" is a website, blog, or online store on which you apply or wish to apply the service. "End users" are any visitors to your site who interact with the service. "Free trial version" refers to a trial period of fourteen (14) days offered free of charge to all clients opening an account on Site Search. "Plan" defines a set of features and limitations offered to the client either free of charge or for a subscription fee. For a complete description of the plans and features, visit search.loxal.net/pricing. "Third-party services" refers to those services not provided directly by loxal but that are necessary for the proper functioning of the service, such as ISPs or payment service providers. The "Site ID" is a unique identifier for each account that corresponds to the domain name of the site provided during registration.

2. Scope

2.1 The use of Site Search is exclusively subject to these terms. Any divergent, conflicting, or supplementary terms and conditions shall only become part of the contract if and to the extent that loxal has expressly agreed to them. These terms only apply if the customer is an entrepreneur as defined under §14 of the German Civil Code (BGB) or a legal entity / special fund under public law.

2.2 If individual agreements are made with the client (including ancillary agreements, addenda, and amendments to these terms), these shall in any case take precedence over these terms. Such agreements, subject to proof to the contrary, require written confirmation from loxal. With the exception of its directors and authorized officers, loxal employees are not entitled to give verbal approval to any addenda or amendments to the agreements made, including these terms. Such commitments must be confirmed in writing by loxal in order to be valid.

3. Registration, free trial version, setup & integration

3.1 To use the service, you must register the website where you want to use the Site Search engine. You must provide a valid domain name and your email address. You can either fill out the registration form or use the Getting Started Gadget. By clicking on the "Accept Terms & Conditions" checkbox, you are making a binding offer to enter into an agreement for the use of the Site Search service in accordance with these terms. We will confirm receipt of your registration request together with our registration confirmation by an automated e-mail immediately after submitting the crawl request. This e-mail constitutes our declaration of your offer to enter into a contract with us. The same applies to registering for a paid account or the upgrade/downgrade of a paid plan. You must save the content of your registration and contract data by saving the automated e-mail confirmation. The contract text, including in particular the data you provided as well as the plan you have chosen, will be stored by us and accessible at any time in your dashboard. The same applies to these terms. The language of the contract is English.

3.2 When you sign up for the service, we will automatically open an account with your Site ID and a 14-day free trial will be activated. The features of the free trial, with the exception of a page limit, are the same as those of the largest paid plan: a maximum of 500 pages can be indexed with a free trial account.

3.3 If you do not sign up for a paid plan at the end of your free trial, the available features are automatically limited to those of the free plan. loxal may change the services offered through the free plan at its sole discretion, make them available only for a fee, or terminate the service altogether. Free plans can be terminated anytime and without further notice.

3.4 You can access the "Dashboard" by logging into your account with your Site ID and Site Secret. You must keep your login information confidential and not disclose it to unauthorized third parties. It is your responsibility to ensure that your account and the services available through it are used solely by you or the individuals authorized by you. If you are concerned that unauthorized third parties have gained or will gain knowledge of your login information, you must inform us immediately. In accordance with the statutory provisions, you are responsible for all use and/or other activities that are performed with your login information.

3.5 To enable the service on your website, you must paste the integration code into the source code of your website.

3.6 Using the integration gadget during the setup process you are only allowed to crawl website you own or expressly authorized to crawl. You are not allowed to abuse the integration gadget by crawling websites you have not been expressly authorized by their owner to crawl. You are not allowed to abuse the integration gadget by using it more than five times a day. By crawling the same website more than twice a day constitutes an abuse as well and is not allowed.

3.7 To reduce the risk of automated abuse techniques, the reCAPTCHA mechanism of Google Inc. is applied when you accept these terms and conditions. The reCAPTCHA mechanism is subject to its specific terms and privacy guidelines that are provided via links at the bottom right corner of the integration gadget. By accepting this terms & conditions you are also required to accept Google's reCAPTCHA terms and privacy guidelines.

4. Payment, refunds, upgrades, downgrades

4.1 Payments for paid accounts are made by credit card, unless the payment is made for the entire year in advance. In this case, payment by bank transfer or PayPal may be permitted with our consent and must be paid by no later than seven days after your registration is confirmed. 4.2 All amounts are quoted and payable in Euros (EUR). Unless otherwise expressly stated, the listed fees are net amounts excluding any applicable VAT and other applicable taxes, duties, or transaction-related fees. These costs are to be borne by the client, who agrees to indemnify us from any claim for these costs. 4.3 When using a paid account, you are responsible for providing us with the required billing information in your account. You are required to provide accurate information and keep it up-to-date. If your provided billing information changes during the contract period, you must correct it immediately within your account (visit the Profile page). 4.4 The payment for the use of a paid account is to be paid, at the client's discretion, either monthly or annually in advance. The obligation begins on the day you subscribe to the plan of your choice. An upgrade to a paid account ends your Free trial version or the free use of the "FREE Plan." The cost of your first month or first contract year will be charged immediately after the upgrade. 4.5 loxal may, at your request and within the scope of its operational and technical possibilities, provide additional services for a separately agreed fee. Unless otherwise agreed, we charge separately for extra services by the half hour at the hourly rates in force at the time you ask us to provide said services. 4.6 For plan upgrades or downgrades during your billing period, your future payment will be pro-rated based on the unused time of your previous plan. In the case of a downgrade, no refunds will be issued, but the difference will be applied to future bills. In the case of a cancellation or a downgrade to the "FREE Plan", no refunds will be issued. 4.7 loxal is entitled to change the agreed prices for the contractual services to compensate for increases in personnel and other costs by providing two months' written or e-mail notice. You may terminate the contract in accordance with these terms upon the effective date of these changed prices.

5. Plan quotas

5.1 The monthly fee for using Site Search depends on the number of indexed pages and the monthly search requests of your website(s). If the search quota set in your plan is lower than your actual search volume per month, you will be charged € 0.001 per search query above the agreed search volume. Setting up a search query limit can prevent excessive fees by disabling the search engine if the quota is exceeded.

5.2 Unused monthly search volume does not roll over to the following month.

5.3 If the number of indexed pages exceeds your plan quota, new pages or documents will not be indexed and therefore will not appear in the search results.

6. Termination

6.1 The service will be provided for a period of one month or twelve months from the date of the contract, depending on the selected billing cycle. After expiration of the respective period, the contract is automatically extended by a further period of the same length, unless the parties have otherwise agreed in writing.

6.2 You may terminate your account at any time with or without notice and stop using the service. If you are in a paid plan, you must downgrade to the "FREE Plan" before deleting your account.

6.3 If you cancel and delete your account, you have no right to any refunds or credits for periods already paid, except in the case of your extraordinary termination for cause. The same applies in the event that we have blocked or terminated your account because of a violation of these terms.

6.4 Downgrading the service may result in the loss of your content, features, or the capacity of your account. loxal assumes no liability for such losses. §11 below remains unaffected.

6.5 If you delete your account, we will immediately cease providing the service to you and you will need to remove all Site Search scripts and references from your site.

7. Prohibited and unauthorized use

You are prohibited from any activity related to the use of the services that violates any applicable law or these terms, infringes any third-party rights, or violates the principles concerning the protection of minors. In particular, the following actions are prohibited: the use of the services to store, transmit, or display data for fraudulent purposes or in violation of applicable laws and regulations; the transmission of information that you are not authorized to provide; the use of the services on any website that contains pornographic, hate, violent, or otherwise inappropriate content; collecting information about other users; reverse engineering, decompiling, translating, disassembling, or otherwise attempting to extract the source code for the service, extracting any or all of the service's source code, unless you have a legally indispensable right to do so; using the service in such a way that overburdens or interferes with the performance of the service or interferes with others' use of the service (this includes using automated systems such as "robots", "spiders," or "offline readers" that send more requests to our servers over a period of time than a human can reasonably produce using a standard browser over the same period of time); acts designed to gain unauthorized access to the service, the Site Search systems, or networks; copying, altering, or creating a derivative work of the service, or a part, function, or interface thereof; using the service, including the documentation, to develop a competitive product or service; changing or removing any copyright, logo, or other proprietary notices.

8. Licenses and proprietary rights

8.1 Subject to any terms of our agreement with you, loxal grants you a non-transferable, non-sublicensable, non-exclusive right to use the services in accordance with this agreement for the agreed period. You agree to remove Site Search scripts from your site after termination of this agreement. 8.2 You grant loxal a non-exclusive, revocable right to store, copy, transmit, and display your site's content and to interact with third-party services as necessary for the proper functioning of the services and to fulfill our contractual obligations. 8.3 loxal is entitled to anonymize user data for the purpose of improving the service and to use this anonymous data for other business purposes. 8.4 You grant loxal the unlimited and irrevocable right to use suggestions, recommendations, corrections, or other feedback provided by you free of charge and to include them in the service. 8.5 loxal is entitled to use general information identifying you as our customer (such as name and/or logo) for marketing the service in accordance with applicable law and any guidelines you may stipulate separately. We do not receive any rights to your name or logo and you retain all rights, titles, other rights to this information.

9. Data protection & privacy

9.1 All interaction data between the service and the content of your website is encrypted and provided via SSL. By entering into a contract, you authorize the transmission, storage, and processing of the data transmitted to Site Search with your Site ID and Site Secret. The data includes the actual website and/or product data, search queries, user interactions, and tracking information.

9.2 The Site Search Privacy Policy explains how we treat personal information and protect your privacy and that of your end users when you or they interact with the search engine.

9.3 To the extent that Site Search processes end user personal information ("data" as defined in the Data Processing Agreement) on your behalf, the terms of that agreement shall apply.

10. Responsibilities and Guarantees

10.1 If you send a URL to Site Search that identifies a site or otherwise tell Site Search to index a site, you warrant that you are either the publisher of the site or have the necessary authority to send the URL to us for its indexing using Site Search. Site Search does not guarantee that a particular website is suitable for indexing or that the service can be used with a particular website.  If this is the case, loxal is entitled to withdraw from the contract and will immediately reimburse you for any payments already made.

10.2 You must provide Site Search with reasonable support at your own expense to ensure that the service can be provided. This includes, among other things, the correct integration of the Site Search JavaScript code fragments or the connection of the Site Search API with all necessary parameters, as will be described in the corresponding documentation.

10.3 You must, without delay, but no later than four weeks after notification by loxal, accept any changes to the tools we provide and use in accordance with the contract (e.g. scripts, plugins) and implement the corresponding upgrades.

10.4 loxal warrants that during the contract period: the service will be provided as agreed and in accordance with the applicable documentation; the service is provided in accordance with the applicable service level agreement ("SLA;" cf. §12).

10.5 The SLA terms in §12 do not apply if the service is not available for the following reasons: factors beyond the control of loxal, including force majeure; defects in your services, devices, and/or software or those of third parties as well as third-party providers for which we are not responsible by law; misuse or abuse of the service by you, your employees, or users; use or maintenance of the service in a manner that does not conform to the requirements described herein or in the documentation; changes to the Site Search software made by you, your employees, or users; exceeding your plan quota; failure to use the latest version of Site Search scripts and API.

10.6 Site Search does not guarantee that: the service will meet your specific requirements; the service will be available in an uninterrupted, timely, secure, or defect-free manner; the results achieved with the service will be accurate or reliable; the quality of any products, services, information, or other material you have purchased or received through the service will meet your expectations or that any defects in the service will be corrected.

10.7 Notwithstanding the foregoing provisions, loxal will endeavor to remedy any shortcomings that occur in a timely manner, either by implementing a workaround or by fully remedying the defect.

10.8 You are obliged to notify loxal in writing of any faults in the service promptly upon discovery and to assist us in troubleshooting wherever possible.

11. Liability

11.1 loxal is liable for any damages resulting from its intentional and grossly negligent actions. In the event of ordinary negligence, loxal shall only be liable for damage resulting from injury to life, limb, or health as well as for damage resulting from the breach of a material contractual obligation, which the client can expect to be fulfilled as part of the proper execution of the contract. In the case of liability for damages resulting from a breach of a material contractual obligation, loxal's liability is limited to compensation for foreseeable, typically occurring damage.

11.2 The liability limitations above do not apply if loxal has fraudulently concealed a defect or has guaranteed a certain level of quality. The same applies for client claims according to the German Product Liability Act.

11.3 loxal shall not be liable for the loss of data and/or programs, insofar as the damage is due to the fact that the client has failed to perform backups and thereby ensure that lost data can be recovered with reasonable effort.

11.4 The above limitation of liability also applies to the personal liability of the employees, representatives, and organs of loxal.

11.5 The client may only rescind or terminate the contract for breach of duty not consisting of a defect in the service, only if loxal is responsible for the same.

12. Service Level Agreement / SLA

12.1 We warrant that the Site Search API, search, and control panel will have at least 99.9% availability on a monthly average. Our monitoring systems are the refrence for availability determination.

12.2 The service response time is usually between 10 and 100 ms per request. Our monitirong systems are the refrence for latency determination.

13. Final Provisions

13.1 We reserve the right, at our sole discretion, to change or update these terms at any time. We will email you the changes at least 30 days before the change takes effect. Your continued use of the services constitutes acceptance of the changes to the agreement.

13.2 The headquarters of loxal in Munich is the place of delivery for the services we provide.

13.3 For the contractual relationship between loxal and the client, German law applies, with the exclusion of the UN sales law.

13.4 The exclusive place of jurisdiction is Munich.

13.5 The client is entitled to offset or retain payments only to the extent that its claim has been court-ordered or is uncontested. A right of retention may only be asserted for counterclaims arising from the same contractual relationship. In each case the rights of the client due to defects in our service remain unaffected.

14. Severability

If individual parts of this agreement prove invalid, the validity of the remaining parts shall not be affected.