Identity first
Give a smell a persistent identity before adding rankings, recommendations or commerce.
PUBLIC METHODOLOGY
Explain the trust model. Keep the secret sauce private.
SmellBook can be transparent about evidence, definitions and user trust without publishing proprietary ranking, recommendation or graph-building methods.
Separate kinds of evidence
Scientific sources, community perception, cultural association and model prediction should never be presented as interchangeable.
Context matters
A smell can change with state, place, product form, memory and use context. The public model should preserve those distinctions.
Personal is not universal
Aggregate perception can reveal patterns, but individual experience can disagree with the crowd without being 'wrong'.
Citations for factual claims
When SmellBook makes a verifiable scientific or factual claim, the long-term standard is to attach an appropriate source.
No hidden commercial bias
Future product recommendation should be independent of commission. Sponsored placement should be visibly labeled.
Search helps visitors; it does not create new canonical content.
Internal Search is lexical, non-personalized and marked noindex,follow. Canonical knowledge pages remain indexable, while query variants do not become search-engine landing pages. Sitemap dates follow editorial update metadata rather than deployment time.
Read the indexing policy ↗Public
Definitions, evidence labels, source standards, safety principles and what a feature means.
Private
Ranking weights, recommendation formulas, graph-construction logic, internal scoring and cross-product proprietary methodology.