How Liners search works

Search matches your query to Liners pages

Liners search uses product names, descriptions, categories, features, countries, and other indexed page text. It may combine word matching with meaning-based matching when that helps find a relevant result.

Search can also recognise close product-name matches. A clear name match may appear as a Top Match.

People are searchable too

Liners search also covers the people behind African software companies. You can search a person by name or by their product, then open their profile from the results.

Search only shows a person whose product is published and whose profile is public. If Liners hides a person, that person also leaves search.

Result order

Liners orders search results by relevance to your query. A product with more relevant words or meaning can appear above a product with more general popularity.

The exact method can change as Liners improves search. We do not publish weights or thresholds because that could help people game search results.

Sponsored results

Liners does not sell listing tiers, and payment does not change the order of organic search results. Boosted products take labelled slots above the organic list on search and listing pages; the organic results keep their own order below them. A product that the Liners team features by hand does not move up in search results either. Sponsored cards use separate paid placements and carry a label.

Other product pages may use different ranking signals. Read how Liners ranks products for those differences and how advertising works for paid placements.

Filters and sorting

Filters narrow the result set by the fields you choose. A selected sort can replace the default relevance order.

Search pages with a query, filter, sort, or later result page may use a separate canonical or noindex rule. This keeps search combinations from creating duplicate public pages.

What signed-out visitors and machines see

Most listing pages show you the first 15 products, then a sign-in panel. Later result pages need a free account. Some listings show fewer products before the panel; product alternatives show five.

Search engine crawlers get the whole listing, because rows removed from the page would also remove the links that Liners needs indexed. These pages carry Google's paywall markup, which tells search engines that a sign-in stands between you and the rest of the list.

Liners also publishes a machine-readable copy of each public page. Add .md to the address of a page, or ask for it with the Accept: text/markdown header. AI assistants and other software can read these copies. See llms.txt for the full instructions.

The Markdown copies of the product listings are complete: each page of a category, tag, country, best-of or alternatives list holds every product on that page, and you can walk the list to the end. The Markdown copies of the people, investor and funding directories stop where the sign-in panel stops, because Liners buys or enriches that company data. The Markdown copy of the Graveyard list also stops at the sign-in panel, but each Graveyard record page stays complete.

The canonical HTML page is always the address to cite. The Markdown copies are not indexed.

Search limits

Search depends on the information Liners has about each product. Missing or stale product data can affect whether a result appears.

You can suggest a correction if a product has the wrong name, category, feature, or country. You can also browse product alternatives when you want products with a similar use case.