Usage, in public
This is everything the site records about its own use. Not a summary of it — the whole of it. The page you are reading calls the same endpoint anyone can call: /api/pulse.
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What these three numbers mean
| Counter | Incremented when |
|---|---|
| Visits | The page is opened. Once per browser tab, so a reload does not count twice. |
| Documents | A note is loaded into the box — either the test document or one you chose from your own machine. |
| Matches | A match actually runs against the 500-trial corpus. |
After a match has run, the tool asks one optional question — who you are — from a list of five answers. Answering adds one to a total for that answer. Ignoring it is the default and costs nothing. It is there because anonymous traffic cannot tell an engineer reading about the compiler from a coordinator who would use it, and that is the only distinction that decides whether this is worth continuing.
What is not counted
The counters are integers. They are incremented; nothing is appended to a list. So there is no record for any individual visit to be found in, and that is a property of the storage rather than a policy about it.
- No identifier of any kind. No cookie, no stored ID, no hashed IP, no fingerprint. Nothing here can tell whether two visits came from the same person.
- Nothing from your note. Not its text, not its length, not what it matched. A counter is not a good enough reason to start keeping the one thing this service exists to not keep.
- No referring URL. Only a host, and only when it is a site already named in the source — otherwise it is filed as other. A full referring URL can carry a search query or the path of a private page.
The file that does this is about a hundred lines and is worth more than
this page:
deploy/api/_counters.py.
It is the code that is deployed.