A directory is only useful if you can trust its order. This is a plain statement of what decides the order of results here, what has no effect on it, and how each of those is enforced. It is written down so that it can be checked and so that it can be held against us.
Relevance decides, and it is not close
The order of search results is decided first and mostly by how well a listing matches the words you typed. That signal is weighted more heavily than every other signal put together, deliberately.
The alternative is a directory that answers a specific question with its most popular listing, and a search that feels arbitrary is a search nobody uses twice. If you search for a narrow subject and get a large well-known conference in a neighbouring field, that is a bug and we would like to hear about it.
Everything else — how complete a listing is, how people have engaged with it — breaks ties within relevance. It does not overturn it.
Newness is not a penalty
Engagement is measured as a rate against how often a listing has been shown, not as a raw count. A conference added yesterday has not been seen by anybody, and counting its zero saves against a listing that has been up for a year would freeze the directory into whatever was popular the day it launched.
A listing that has not been shown enough times to judge is scored neutrally rather than badly. Too little evidence is not the same as evidence of poor quality.
Paid promotion has no effect on organic ranking
This is the commitment that matters most, so here it is without hedging.
Paid placements sit in a separate, visibly labelled region of the page. They carry a promotion label wherever they appear. They do not move any listing up or down in the organic results, because the code that orders those results cannot read campaign or promotion data at all — it is not passed in, and there is nothing there to weigh.
Promotion is never a condition of being listed. A listing nobody has paid for is not demoted, delayed or deprioritised. An unclaimed listing — one added by somebody other than the organisers — is not downranked for being unclaimed.
We do not sell the removal, demotion or suppression of any listing, at any price. There is no product for it.
No price on any card
Fees appear on the conference page and nowhere else — not in search results, not on map cards, not in landing grids. You can still filter by fee, because narrowing a set is a different thing from ranking it.
Surfacing price in a list systematically promotes the cheapest listings, and in this category cheapness correlates with the conferences this audience is trying to avoid.
No countdowns
You will not find a ticking timer anywhere here. Dates are shown as a date when they are far off, as weeks when they are closer, and as days inside a fortnight. Once a date has passed the listing says so plainly.
Academic conference decisions run on six to eighteen months. Timer mechanics are useless at that timescale, and they are the exact cue researchers use to identify predatory conference sites.
Your search does not leave this machine
The search index runs on our own infrastructure and the model that understands your query runs inside it. No query is sent to an outside service.
That was not a requirement anybody gave us. It is a property worth keeping: a search query reveals what somebody is working on before they have published it, and for an academic that is genuinely sensitive.
Nothing is deleted
A listing is never removed. Past editions keep their addresses, because they hold links and history. A listing that has been withdrawn shows a page saying so rather than disappearing, and an address that once worked here is not supposed to break.
What we do not claim
We do not claim that every listing here is a conference worth attending. A person reads every submission and we decline the ones we cannot verify, and that is a filter rather than a guarantee. Any directory claiming more than that is telling you something about itself.
If you find something here that should not be, report it from the listing. A person reads those.