Sources & methodology
Nothing enters this database without a source. This page explains how facts are verified, how numbers are labeled, and how sources are preserved.
Source policy
- Every factual claim on a project page is backed by at least one listed source.
- Sources are ranked: official company statements and financial filings first, established press second, blogs and forums only for color or when nothing better exists.
- Each source is archived (Wayback Machine or archive.today) at the time it is added, and the archived copy is linked. Live links rot; archives do not.
Confidence levels for numbers
User counts are where most tech folklore is born. Every metric here carries one of three labels:
- Confirmed: official company figure or audited financial report.
- Reported: published by media, citing a source.
- Estimated: analyst estimate, or our own, clearly marked.
We also never mix metric types. 100 million registered accounts is not 100 million users. If a media story conflates them, we record what the underlying source actually measured.
Dates and precision
When only a year is known, we say so. A date shown as “1996” means the day and month are unknown, not January 1st. Shutdown dates prefer the date the service actually stopped working, not the announcement date (we record both when known).
Images and screenshots
Screenshots and logos are reproduced here for one purpose: to identify a product and to illustrate what is written about it. That is what the European right of quotation (Article 5(3)(d) of Directive 2001/29/EC, and the equivalent provision in Croatian copyright law) and the American fair use doctrine both permit. Three conditions come with it, and we keep to all three. The material was already lawfully published. The source is named on every image, with a link to the capture it came from. And we use no more than the point requires, which in practice means one or two images per project rather than a gallery.
Copyright in an archived page belongs to whoever made that page. Not to us, and not to the Internet Archive, which preserves it and removes it on request. So we do not mirror archived pages onto our own servers. We take a single frame, credit it, and link back.
If it is yours and you want it taken down
Write to hello@looksback.com and name the page and the image. It comes down. You do not need to prove ownership first, quote a statute, or send anything formal, and we will not ask you to argue about fair use. The same address works if you would rather we used a better copy, or if a credit is wrong or missing.
Verification
Each page shows a last verified date. Records older than 12 months get re-checked. If you find an error, write to hello@looksback.com with a source and it will be fixed.