Jasmine Directory is a human-edited

web directory A web directory or link directory is an online list or catalog of websites. That is, it is a directory on the World Wide Web of (all or part of) the World Wide Web. Historically, directories typically listed entries on people or businesses, and th ...

providing websites and businesses categorized topically and regionally. It offers thirteen topic-based categories and one region-based category with hand-picked and reviewed users' suggested resources. Jasmine Directory was founded in 2009 by Pécsi András and Robert Gomboș and is headquartered in

Valley Cottage Valley Cottage is a hamlet and census-designated place in the town of Clarkstown, New York, United States. It is located northeast of West Nyack, northwest of Central Nyack east of Bardonia, south of Congers, northwest of Nyack, and west of ...

New York New York most commonly refers to: * New York City, the most populous city in the United States, located in the state of New York * New York (state), a state in the northeastern United States New York may also refer to: Film and television * '' ...

. It won eight prizes during 2013–2014 for its editorial discretion and manually added resources. Jasmine Directory proved to be useful for SEO Google search results since they manually add about 90% of the resources.

History

The directory was launched in 2009 at the

Budapest University of Technology and Economics The Budapest University of Technology and Economics ( hu, Budapesti Műszaki és Gazdaságtudományi Egyetem or in short ), official abbreviation BME, is the most significant university of technology in Hungary and is considered the world's oldes ...

by Pécsi András and Robert Gomboș. It operates from

Operation and structure

Jasmine Directory lists educational resources and businesses of public interest, which can be filtered based on business category. Jasmine Directory's editors manually add resources to the index, which according to co-founder Gomboș represents 90% of its listings. Businesses and site owners can also suggest their websites for review by paying a "suggestion fee;" however, inclusion is not guaranteed if the suggested resources do not comply with the editorial guidelines, in which case the review fee is refunded. The annual fee for standard listings is $59. Site owners are not paying for placement, but they are paid for editing and the administrative effort to review and create a listing. The directory labels listings chosen by editors using an "EP" mark to separate those websites from ones submitted by site owners. To suggest a resource for inclusion, users may select an appropriate category; they can also customize their listing by adding their websites' social media fan pages and contact information based on which businesses'

Google Maps Google Maps is a web mapping platform and consumer application offered by Google. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panoramic views of streets ( Street View), real-time traffic conditions, and rou ...

location will be generated accordingly. Once the listing is posted, its publisher can edit the details any time, but an upgrade feature is also available for those who change the listing. The directory runs an audit of all external resources every two to three months so as to remove dead links, dropped or parked domains, etc. Every website that doesn't come back online within a timeframe is deleted from their index. Likewise, redirected sites and sites with questionable legitimacy are turned down. The directory is organized by topic and region into 14 categories. Each main category has several subcategories, including recreation and sports, regional, home and garden, business and finance, and computers and technology. Each category and subcategory is described and contains a relevant image. A

blog A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order ...

where users can read industry-specific articles is also featured. In an interview, Gomboș stated the directory's purpose is to list educational references along with local amenities and businesses of public interest.

Main categories

The 14 main categories are: #

Arts The arts are a very wide range of human practices of creative expression, storytelling and cultural participation. They encompass multiple diverse and plural modes of thinking, doing and being, in an extremely broad range of media. Both hi ...

Humanities Humanities are academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture. In the Renaissance, the term contrasted with divinity and referred to what is now called classics, the main area of secular study in universities at the t ...

Business Business is the practice of making one's living or making money by producing or Trade, buying and selling Product (business), products (such as goods and Service (economics), services). It is also "any activity or enterprise entered into for pr ...

Finance Finance is the study and discipline of money, currency and capital assets. It is related to, but not synonymous with economics, the study of production, distribution, and consumption of money, assets, goods and services (the discipline of fina ...

Computers A computer is a machine that can be programmed to carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as programs. These programs ...

Technology Technology is the application of knowledge to reach practical goals in a specifiable and reproducible way. The word ''technology'' may also mean the product of such an endeavor. The use of technology is widely prevalent in medicine, science, ...

Health Health, according to the World Health Organization, is "a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease and infirmity".World Health Organization. (2006)''Constitution of the World Health Organiza ...

& Fitness #

Home A home, or domicile, is a space used as a permanent or semi-permanent residence for one or many humans, and sometimes various companion animals. It is a fully or semi sheltered space and can have both interior and exterior aspects to it. H ...

Garden A garden is a planned space, usually outdoors, set aside for the cultivation, display, and enjoyment of plants and other forms of nature. The single feature identifying even the wildest wild garden is ''control''. The garden can incorporate both ...

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

Marketing Marketing is the process of exploring, creating, and delivering value to meet the needs of a target market in terms of goods and services; potentially including selection of a target audience; selection of certain attributes or themes to emph ...

Kids Kid, Kids, KIDS, and K.I.D.S. may refer to: Common meanings * Colloquial term for a child or other young person ** Also for a parent's offspring regardless of age * Engage in joking * Young goats * The goat meat of young goats * Kidskin, lea ...

Teens Adolescence () is a transitional stage of physical and psychological development that generally occurs during the period from puberty to adulthood (typically corresponding to the age of majority). Adolescence is usually associated with the ...

Leisure Leisure has often been defined as a quality of experience or as free time. Free time is time spent away from business, work, job hunting, domestic chores, and education, as well as necessary activities such as eating and sleeping. Leisure ...

Travel Travel is the movement of people between distant geographical locations. Travel can be done by foot, bicycle, automobile, train, boat, bus, airplane, ship or other means, with or without luggage, and can be one way or round trip. Travel c ...

News News is information about current events. This may be provided through many different Media (communication), media: word of mouth, printing, Mail, postal systems, broadcasting, Telecommunications, electronic communication, or through the tes ...

Politics Politics (from , ) is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status. The branch of social science that studies ...

People A person (plural, : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of pr ...

Society A society is a group of individuals involved in persistent social interaction, or a large social group sharing the same spatial or social territory, typically subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations. Socie ...

Recreation Recreation is an activity of leisure, leisure being discretionary time. The "need to do something for recreation" is an essential element of human biology and psychology. Recreational activities are often done for enjoyment, amusement, or pleasur ...

Sports Sport pertains to any form of competitive physical activity or game that aims to use, maintain, or improve physical ability and skills while providing enjoyment to participants and, in some cases, entertainment to spectators. Sports can, th ...

Region In geography, regions, otherwise referred to as zones, lands or territories, are areas that are broadly divided by physical characteristics (physical geography), human impact characteristics (human geography), and the interaction of humanity and t ...

al #

Science Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for ...

Reference Reference is a relationship between objects in which one object designates, or acts as a means by which to connect to or link to, another object. The first object in this relation is said to ''refer to'' the second object. It is called a ''name'' ...

Shopping Shopping is an activity in which a customer browses the available goods or services presented by one or more retailers with the potential intent to purchase a suitable selection of them. A Retail#Shopper profiles, typology of shopper types ha ...

E-commerce E-commerce (electronic commerce) is the activity of electronically buying or selling of products on online services or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain manageme ...

Reception

Between 2013 and 2014, Jasmine Directory was rated and awarded eight times in "Top Ten Web Directories", by former

DMOZ DMOZ (from ''directory.mozilla.org'', an earlier domain name, stylized in lowercase in its logo) was a multilingual open-content directory of World Wide Web links. The site and community who maintained it were also known as the Open Directory ...

meta editor and owner and operator of the ''

Magic City Morning Star The ''Magic City Morning Star'' is an on-line newspaper serving the Katahdin region of Maine, including the Penobscot County towns of Millinocket, East Millinocket, and Medway Medway is a unitary authority district and conurbation in K ...

'' Ken Anderson. For Anderson's list, 90 general web directories were reviewed quarterly and assessed in five areas including aesthetics, size, intuitiveness, quality and usefulness. As of December 2014, Moz had assigned Jasmine Directory a Domain Authority of 60/100, a Page Authority of 67/100, MozRank of 6.81, and a MozTrust of 6.64. Its Majestic Trust Flow was 59, while the Citation Flow value was 49. In 2016, a listing in the directory appeared to be useful for

search engine optimization Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of Web traffic, website traffic to a website or a web page from web search engine, search engines. SEO targets unpaid traffic (known as "natural" or "Organ ...

for local

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

search results. The same year, the directory obtained a score of 5 in a rating session conducted by the ''Association of Internet Research Specialists'' and published in the ''Internet Information Resource Book'' where

search engines A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...

, web directories, online archives and

online databases An online database is a database accessible from a local network or the Internet, as opposed to one that is stored locally on an individual computer or its attached storage (such as a CD). Online databases are hosted on websites, made available as s ...

have been rated on a scale from 1 to 5+. According to information posted on the ''Social Implications'' blog, Jasmine Directory appeared to be compliant with

's general guidelines as of February 2018. Essentially, this means that they use editorial discretion to permit or deny which businesses they allow in their directory listings. Also, the ''

Daily News Egypt ''Daily News Egypt'' (''DNE'') is an English-language daily Egyptian newspaper established in 2005 and relaunched in June 2012. Under former owner Egyptian Media Services, it was distributed with the ''International Herald Tribune'' as a suppl ...

'' found the directory to follow "the rules set forth by Google". Ann Smarty, search marketer and columnist at ''

Entrepreneur Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value. With this definition, entrepreneurship is viewed as change, generally entailing risk beyond what is normally encountered in starting a business, which may include other values th ...

'', found the directory provided a "valuable user experience". In 2018, Shawn Hessinger, an industry-specific author and the executive editor of ''Small Business Trends'', praised the directory as "selective", while in a more mixed review, an editor of ''

TNT Trinitrotoluene (), more commonly known as TNT, more specifically 2,4,6-trinitrotoluene, and by its preferred IUPAC name 2-methyl-1,3,5-trinitrobenzene, is a chemical compound with the formula C6H2(NO2)3CH3. TNT is occasionally used as a reagen ...

'' labelled it as "very traditional" and "tad simplistic" with an "old looking interface". An article published by ''

The New Indian Express ''The New Indian Express'' is an Indian English-language broadsheet daily newspaper published by the Chennai-based Express Publications. It was founded in 1932 as ''The Indian Express'', under the ownership of Chennai-based P. Varadarajulu Naid ...

'' noted that "while Jasmine Directory's layout it's beginning to age, it still looks fresh and clean." Leo Giosuè from ''

The Jerusalem Post ''The Jerusalem Post'' is a broadsheet newspaper based in Jerusalem, founded in 1932 during the British Mandate of Palestine by Gershon Agron as ''The Palestine Post''. In 1950, it changed its name to ''The Jerusalem Post''. In 2004, the paper w ...

'' named Jasmine Directory as "one of the most prominent directories in the industry." Matt Hodgson, owner of Addme, a SEO company founded in 1996, opines that "when done the right way, directories such as Jasmine Directory are far more reliable than a typical search engine result because they are edited by real people who go through every link to determine whether it provides any relevant information." He also gave the directory a grade A, pointing that Jasmine Directory is "more user oriented in so many ways and Google compliant as well."

References

External links