Editorial review
Human moderators review contributed facts, evidence, relationships, guides, warnings, and publication gates. Unknown facts remain unknown; maintainers can propose changes but cannot publish them directly. No generated summary or model-created recommendation is used.
Organic alternatives
OpenAlternative organic alternatives v4, version 4. Relationship confidence, category fit, logarithmic popularity, as-of maintenance and freshness, bounded anomaly quarantine, and known-data penalties. Payment is fixed at zero. Popularity is logarithmic. Suspicious high-rate 30-day star growth is shown but quarantined from momentum pending review. Trending uses 40% growth, 25% activity, 15% bounded first-party decision engagement, 10% saves and compare actions, and 10% editorial freshness. Seed or no-data mode reports engagement as unobserved and contributes zero; stars are never relabelled as engagement. These signals affect trending only. There are no vote or review-fraud signals because the product collects neither. Stable ties and at most two leading Projects per repository owner reduce domination. Commercial influence is database-constrained to zero.
Relationship boundary
Only an explicit published Project → Proprietary Product relationship can place a project on an alternatives page. Category and tag overlap can support similarity, but cannot publish an alternative claim.
Search
Search is deterministic lexical matching over concise discovery fields. The global palette requests only bounded suggestions from the server. PostgreSQL full-text and trigram indexes select candidates in persistent mode; the same typo-tolerant scoring rules order fixtures and seed mode. Search pages are not indexed.
Unknown and constraints
Unknown is preserved as unknown. A hard constraint excludes only a known conflicting fact; unknown Projects remain visible with a cue. Deprecated and acquired are separate reviewed lifecycle facts and are never inferred from prose. Groups appear only when two credible Projects meet their transparent rules. Repository-seed facts and relationships are labelled legacy imports and are never silently upgraded to verified.
Quality gate
An alternatives page needs at least three credible, non-archived projects with relationship confidence of at least 50% before it may be indexed. A pending observed-license mismatch or active reviewed blocking warning excludes organic placement without hiding the last-known-good page. Thin pages remain useful and crawlable from direct links, but carry noindex and a contribution CTA.