What we collect, and why

Great Books Search is a tool for teachers. We collect what we need to run it: your account, your courses, and your searches. We don’t sell data, we don’t show ads, and we don’t build profiles. It isn’t meant for students, and we ask teachers not to enter students’ personal information.

• Your account: name, email address and a password (stored only as a one-way hash).
• Sign-in sessions: a session cookie, and the IP address and browser that signed in, so we can keep accounts secure.
• What you put in: courses, reading lists, co-teachers, notes, saved passages, and anything you send us as feedback.
• Your searches: the questions, themes and notes you enter, and the passages returned, so you can reopen past searches.
• Usage counts: how many searches of each kind you run, to apply the free-tier limits.
• Anonymous product analytics: page views and a few events (a search run, a passage saved), with no cookies and no personal profile.

If you use the search on our home page without an account, we don’t store what you search. We keep a short-lived count per IP address (about a minute) to limit abuse.

We use a small number of providers, each only to run the tool:

• Vercel: hosting, and the anonymous analytics above.
• Neon: the database, in the United States.
• Google (the Gemini API): the text of a search is sent to Google to find and describe passages. Under the terms we use, Google does not use it to train its models.
• Upstash: counters for rate limits and usage allowances.
• Resend: account emails (confirming your address, resetting your password).

One cookie keeps you signed in. We don’t use advertising or tracking cookies.

You can. Colleagues you invite to your school can see the courses you share with them and co-teach, and their names and emails appear to each other in your school’s member list. Your searches, notes and saved passages are yours alone. We look at data only to run and fix the service, or when you ask us to.

We keep your data while you have an account. To delete your account and everything in it, write to hello@greatbooksearch.com from the address you signed up with. We’ll remove it promptly; copies in our database backups expire within a few days after that.

If your school has a review process or a data agreement for us to sign, send it to hello@greatbooksearch.com and we’ll answer in writing.

If we change this policy in a way that matters, we’ll say so on this page and email account holders. Questions go to hello@greatbooksearch.com.