About Field39
Field39 is a curator's index of the open web — 831 websites filed by hand into 22 plainly labelled sections. The index was built on the principle that a human-organised catalogue serves a different purpose from a search engine: where algorithms rank by signal, a curator organises by sense. Every entry in Field39 has been individually reviewed and carries a short description drawn from the site itself.
The sections span the full breadth of commercial and informational life online: from dental practices and law firms to travel operators, media organisations, and the considerable variety of the General Index. Each section is sized by what the open web offers rather than by an arbitrary quota, which is why some sections hold five entries and others hold nearly two hundred.
Filing a site with Field39 is free. New entries are reviewed before they appear in the index, and descriptions are drawn from the site's own copy rather than written by the editorial team. This approach keeps the record honest: what Field39 says about a site is what the site says about itself.
The name Field39 refers to the practice of field notes — the careful, systematic recording of what one finds in the wild. Applied to the web, it means a catalogue that rewards browsing as well as direct lookup: you are as likely to find something useful by reading a full section as by searching for a specific term.
New sections are not added lightly; the existing 22 cover the ground well. What grows is the number of entries within each section, as the web itself grows and more sites find their way to the submission form. Field39 is an ongoing project, and the index you read today will be more complete tomorrow than it is now.