The Directory That Deletes the Chains Opens With 1.4 Million Independent Listings

NEW YORK - Rezul -- A directory now open to the public takes an unusual position for a business listings site: it actively removes companies rather than collecting them.

HappyNew.Day lists 1,389,597 independent farms, farmers markets, growers, bakers, dairies, nurseries, bookshops, vintage shops and museums across 238 countries and territories. Every national and multinational chain is detected and excluded. Browsing is free and requires no account.

The most contentious part of that rule is the one visitors notice last: the large charity thrift chains are excluded too.

"A charity with thousands of storefronts would be the first result in almost every town, and it is not the thing this directory is for, however good its cause," the site's About page states.

Identifying a chain turns out to be the hard problem behind the site. HappyNew.Day does it three ways at once: brand links in the underlying open data, a maintained list of known operators, and a test for the same business repeating across many locations. That test is deliberately cautious in both directions. A common shop name shared by unrelated businesses is not treated as a chain, and neither is a group of independents who happen to share a supplier's website.

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"It is a filter, not a mood," the site says of its independence rule.

The commercial rules are equally blunt. Listing order is determined by distance and by what is known about each place. Ordering is not for sale, no business can pay to move up, and there is no advertising and no paid placement anywhere on the site.

The contents break down as 1,083,519 farms, markets and makers, 47,194 farmers markets, 76,574 independent second-hand shops and 136,603 museums.

Records were seeded from public and open data - the Overture Maps Foundation, GeoNames, OpenStreetMap contributors and Natural Earth - rather than from businesses signing up. So an owner who finds their farm or shop already listed can be certain nothing was taken from a private account.

That origin also means the records vary in depth. About 38 percent of them, 524,507 listings, carry only a name, a category and a town. Those pages are deliberately left short, and no description is written unless a real source says something worth repeating.

Owners can claim and correct their own listing free of charge, or have it removed entirely on request.

HappyNew.Day is made by one person. There is no company, no investor, and nothing on the site is for sale. Browse it at https://happynew.day