What Strata is
Strata is a free, hand-logged field catalogue of the open web: 797 working websites, filed by a person into 22 strata named after the kind of material a geologist would expect to find there — sandstone, slate, ochre, granite, copper, jade, oxide. Every line in the catalogue is a working URL, a short description, and a stratum.
This is search inverted into a collection. Instead of an infinite scroll, you get a finite column. Instead of an opaque ranker, you get an alphabetic list, kept short on purpose. Instead of paid placement, you get a flat catalogue: every sample is the same kind of sample.
How a sample gets filed
You paste a URL on the filing page, choose the stratum it belongs in, and we file it. We fetch a one-line description from your own page if you do not write one. The sample is visible inside its stratum within a minute. It is free and it stays free — Strata has no paid tier, no “featured” slot, no tracking pixels, and no upsells.
What gets logged, what gets quietly returned
We file working websites — that is, URLs that resolve and load some kind of content. We quietly return: dead links, malware, parked-domain redirects, sites that are only a sign-up wall, sites that are obviously scams, and copy-paste link farms. We do not police taste; we only police whether the sample is real.
Why a catalogue
The open web used to be navigated through small, hand-kept catalogues — Yahoo's original directory, dmoz, the Curlie tree. Strata is in that lineage, but shorter and slower. We collect 797 samples across 22 strata, not millions. The bet is that 22 legible strata are more useful than a search bar with a million answers behind it.