A hand-logged field catalogue of the open web — 797 core samples filed across 22 geological-style strata. Pick a stratum, scroll the column, or file your own sample.
Yes. Strata is free to use and free to file into. There is no paid tier, no “featured” slot, no advertising, and no tracking. We never charge to add, keep, or promote a sample.
A stratum is one of the 22 topic-bands the catalogue is divided into — each named after a kind of geological material. A core sample is a single working website filed into one of those strata. Together the strata form the column you see on the home page.
By stratum, alphabetically inside each stratum. The catalogue is read by hand, so it is short on purpose: each stratum is one column you can finish reading. We do not rank, score, or auto-sort — the only ordering is the alphabet.
Open the filing page, paste your URL, pick the stratum that fits, and submit. The sample is on file inside the stratum within a minute. If you do not write a description we fetch a one-line summary from your own page.
Yes, by hand. We quietly return dead links, parked-domain redirects, malware, scams, and pure link-farms. We do not police taste — we only check that the sample is a real, working site.
Strata is a free field catalogue of the open web — a slow, hand-kept survey of working websites filed into twenty-two strata, each named for the kind of material that turns up there. We log working sites as core samples and arrange them, layer by layer, the way a field geologist arranges fragments of bedrock: shortest stratum first, longest at the bottom, every entry in a single column you can read in one sitting.
There is nothing to install and nothing to pay. Open a stratum, scroll the column, and follow the samples that fit. When you run a site of your own, you can file it as a core sample in under a minute — free, and free to stay.
Search has become a million plausible guesses. Strata is the smaller, older idea: a catalogue you can actually finish reading, kept by a person, organised the way a museum drawer is organised — by what the thing is, not by what an algorithm thought you wanted yesterday.