How to read this site

OSINT Lab is a small, curated knowledge product. It publishes four kinds of pages — tools, articles, sources and taxonomy hubs — and each of them answers a different question. This page exists so you can read any of them without over- or under-interpreting what you see.

The four kinds of pages

• Tools. A tool is a narrow, explainable piece of software. Each tool answers a single technical question about a public target (a URL, a domain, a feed). Tools are passive and bounded — see the methodology page for the exact contract.
• Articles. Editorial writing: guides, tutorials, change notes. An article is the human explanation layered on top of a tool, a source, or a concept. Articles cite their sources and carry publication and update dates.
• Sources. A source is an upstream feed we track — a vendor blog, a repository, a documentation site. Source pages list recent items that passed editorial review; they do not imply endorsement of every linked item.
• Taxonomies. Macrocategories → categories → tags. The taxonomy is the shared spine tying tools, articles and sources together. Two entities sharing a category are adjacent, not equivalent.

What "freshness" means here

Each page carries a visible timestamp, and those timestamps mean different things:

• A tool timestamp reflects its registry metadata or runtime config. It does NOT mean the tool itself was re-audited on that date.
• An article timestamp is editorial — it changes when the author updates the body, adds a correction or refreshes linked material.
• A source timestamp is operational — it reflects the last successful fetch, not an endorsement refresh.
• A taxonomy hub timestamp reflects the most recent edit to the taxonomy structure itself.

Canonical URLs are signalled to IndexNow on real editorial updates — not on cosmetic re-deploys. A page that recently moved in a search engine is usually a page that was actually edited.

What you can and cannot assume

• If a tool is listed in the public catalog, it passed editorial review and is operationally safe to run on a public URL.
• If a source item is visible on a source page, it was approved and flagged as public — reference-only items surface on the tools and articles that cite them, not on the source stream.
• If an article links to a tool or a source, the link is intentional. The link does not certify the upstream's accuracy — only the relevance of the reference.
• Absence of a tool, article or source is not a verdict. The catalog is deliberately small; we publish what we can stand behind.

Editorial judgement

• We prefer narrow, passive tools over broad active ones.
• We prefer documented methods over heuristics. If a finding cannot be explained in plain language, the tool is not ready.
• We publish corrections in place, with a new updated timestamp. We do not silently rewrite history.
• We do not synthesise authors, ratings or peer-review claims that do not exist. The site is maintained by a small team and that is explicit.

Limitations

• We do not run any tool that requires credentials, bypasses access controls or sends traffic a site operator would not expect from a polite browser.
• We do not cover every category of OSINT work. The catalog grows deliberately.
• Machine-readable discovery helpers (sitemap, llms.txt, JSON-LD) are secondary to the visible site — the page you are reading is the source of truth if they ever disagree.

See also

• Methodology — how tools are built and how findings are labelled.
• About — what OSINT Lab is and is not.
• Contact — how to report bugs, suggest tools and reach the team.