What Jayde is, and why it is not a web index
Jayde.com is a business-to-business web directory with a search box on top of it, and it is still running: the site was live with a current copyright notice when checked on 19 August 2026. A visitor gets a category tree of industry sectors — Aerospace, Automotive, Energy and so on — and a search field that queries a database of business websites. It describes itself as "the Premier Business to Business Search Engine" and "the internet's largest B2B Search Engine".
The verdict on this page is not a web index, and the reason is worth spelling out because Jayde sits exactly in the gap between the usual categories.
- It is not an own-index engine in the sense that Mojeek or Google is. Those engines run a discovery crawler that follows links across the open web and stores what it finds, so their index is a sample of the web itself. Jayde performs no discovery crawl. A site is in its database only because its owner sent it in and a human approved it.
- It is not resold results either. There is no Google, Bing or Yandex attribution anywhere on the site and no syndication partner is named in its documentation. The listings, the categorisation and the ranking appear to be entirely its own.
What it has is a third thing: a proprietary database that is submission-gated. The coverage of a crawled index is bounded by what the crawler can reach; the coverage of Jayde's index is bounded by who chose to apply. That is a directory, in the pre-2000 sense of the word, and reading its results as a view of the web is a category error.
One honest limitation on that finding: Jayde's robots.txt disallows automated fetching of its search path, so no live query could be run against it during research. The conclusion that no partner feed is involved rests on the operator's own documentation rather than on inspection of live output.
How a site gets into the index
The submission process is unusually strict for a free directory, and it is the clearest evidence of what kind of object this is.
- Ownership must be proved. A submitter demonstrates control of the domain by email, by placing a verification file on the server, by adding a meta tag, or by publishing a blog post. Anonymous third-party listing of somebody else's site is not the model.
- The listing is a business record, not a URL. The form collects business name, description, address, phone number, industry category and social links.
- A human reviews it, and the listing is reindexed overnight once approved.
- Only businesses with their own domain qualify. Subdomains and sites hosted on shared platforms are refused.
Jayde also builds what it calls a ContentMap for each listing: a categorised profile of the site linking to what it identifies as important internal pages. That implies automated fetching of pages on an already-approved domain. It is site-scoped crawling of known properties, not discovery crawling of the open web, and the distinction is the whole argument of this page.
The operator claims over 2 million business websites in the index. That figure is self-reported and not independently verified, and it should never be set alongside the page counts published by crawled engines: two million submitted business listings and a crawled index of the web are not the same kind of object, and the numbers do not compare.
ClickRelevance: ranking by clicks
Jayde's ranking method, which it calls ClickRelevance, orders both categories and search results "by those which are clicked the most by unique searches". There is no link analysis, no relevance model in the modern sense, and no text-matching signal described anywhere in its documentation.
Click-popularity ordering has two well-understood weaknesses, and they both apply here. It is self-reinforcing: whatever is already at the top receives the clicks that keep it at the top, so the order calcifies around whichever listings arrived early. And it is trivially gamed, because clicks are cheap to manufacture and Jayde publishes nothing about how it detects or discounts them.
It also has a privacy implication that is worth stating plainly. Ranking by "unique searches" that click necessarily means logging queries and clicks at some level of granularity. What is retained, for how long, and whether it is tied to any identifier is not documented anywhere that could be located.
Who runs it, and how it makes money
The footer of jayde.com reads "Jayde.com is an iEntry, Inc. website", and its About page gives an iEntry corporate address on Richmond Road in Lexington, Kentucky. There is a wrinkle. iEntry's own website describes only a B2B email-newsletter business, gives a different Lexington address, and does not mention Jayde at all. The company does not publicly claim the property that names it as parent, and the addresses do not match. That is recorded here as an inconsistency, not resolved.
Historically the site belonged to Jayde Online, Inc. of Winnipeg, Manitoba, under chief executive Mel Strocen, alongside a network that included ExactSeek.com, SiteProNews.com, SEO-News.com, GoArticles.com, Blog-Search.com and FreeWebSubmission.com. No announcement, press release or filing recording the transfer of jayde.com to iEntry was found. ExactSeek's documentation still names Jayde Online as its own operator, so the network appears to have been split rather than sold as a whole. When and on what terms Jayde changed hands is unknown.
The historical business model was paid inclusion and listing promotion on an explicitly flat-fee rather than pay-per-click basis — that positioning was the group's public argument in 2005, when its sister property founded the Independent Search Engine & Directory Network to sell fixed-rate placement across member sites as a counterweight to the pay-per-click market. How jayde.com is monetised today could not be established: no current pricing, paid-listing terms or advertising rate card was located, so no prices are stated here and none should be assumed.
Privacy: no published policy at all
No privacy policy, data-retention statement or search-logging disclosure for jayde.com could be located, and no independent audit, regulatory action or press scrutiny of its data handling was found. That absence is itself the finding, and it is a meaningful one for two reasons.
First, the ranking method entails logging search and click behaviour, as described above. Second, the submission flow deliberately collects business contact details — address, telephone, email — and requires proof of domain ownership. That is business data by design, but where the business is a sole trader it is personal data as well.
A service that asks for verified contact details, ranks by observed behaviour, and publishes nothing about what it keeps leaves its users with no documented basis on which to assess it. Anyone weighing a listing should establish what happens to the data first, because the site does not say.
History, and three founding dates
The founding date is genuinely disputed, and the three claims come from three different pages that no source reconciles:
- Jayde's own About page says the site was "established in 1996".
- ExactSeek's About page says the parent, Jayde Online, "was founded in 1993 and incorporated in early 1998".
- A 2005 press release says the parent company "was established in 1998".
These may well describe different things — an informal start, a site launch, an incorporation — but no source says so, so all three are printed rather than averaged into a single date. There is no Wikipedia article on Jayde, Jayde.com or Jayde Online, and the service does not appear in Wikipedia's timeline of web search engines.
What is documented is the middle period: through the 2000s Jayde ran as part of the Winnipeg-based Jayde Online network, and in late June 2005 that group's ExactSeek founded the Independent Search Engine & Directory Network, reported the following month at 48 member sites and growing by three to five a week, positioning independent flat-fee inclusion against the pay-per-click majors. What became of that network is undocumented; no wind-up announcement was found. At some later and unrecorded point, jayde.com passed to iEntry.
Who it suits, and who it does not
What Jayde does well is narrow but real. The ownership-verification requirement and the refusal to list subdomains and hosted-platform sites are quality gates that most free directories abandoned two decades ago. Whatever is in the index is at least a real business with a real domain that claimed itself, which is more than can be said of the scraped business listings that fill much of the web. As a 1990s-vintage directory that simply never died, it also has genuine archival interest.
As a search engine it is a poor choice, and the reasons are structural rather than aesthetic. Its coverage is not "the web" but "whoever applied". Its ranking is a click loop that rewards incumbency. It has no published privacy policy, no documented crawler, no independent traffic measurement, and no public record of its own change of ownership. Its self-description as the internet's largest B2B search engine is unverifiable and, on any normal reading of the phrase "search engine", not accurate.
Nobody looking for web search results should use it — that is what an actual web index is for. Anyone doing serious supplier research should prefer sources that disclose their methodology and their coverage. The one plausible user is a business owner curious about directory listings, and even they are working without the two facts that matter most, since neither the cost nor the data handling is disclosed.
Common misconceptions
- "Jayde is defunct." It is not. The site was live, with a current copyright notice, when checked on 19 August 2026. Older directory listings that mark it dead are wrong.
- "Jayde is a search engine." It calls itself one. It performs no discovery crawl of the open web; it searches a database of business sites their owners submitted for review.
- "Jayde is Canadian." Jayde Online, Inc. was based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, but jayde.com today names iEntry, Inc. of Lexington, Kentucky as its operator.
- "Jayde and ExactSeek are the same thing." They share a corporate lineage but are separate properties with separate databases and, today, apparently separate operators. ExactSeek's much larger page-count claim is not Jayde's and should never be attributed to it.
- "Two million listings makes it comparable to a real index." It does not. Submitted business listings and a crawled index of web pages measure different things, and putting the numbers side by side misleads on both.
Frequently asked questions
Is Jayde a real search engine?
Not in the usual sense. Jayde searches its own database of business websites, but that database is built entirely from listings their owners submitted and a human approved - there is no crawler discovering pages across the open web. It is a curated business directory with a search box, which is why this site classifies it as not a web index rather than as an own-index engine.
Is Jayde.com still online?
Yes. Jayde.com was live and serving its directory when checked on 19 August 2026, carrying a current copyright notice. That makes it one of a small number of 1990s-era directory properties still operating. Listings elsewhere that describe Jayde as defunct are out of date.
Where do Jayde's results come from?
From its own listing database. Sites enter it only when their owner submits them, proves control of the domain by email, file, meta tag or blog post, and passes human review; only businesses with their own domain qualify. No Google, Bing or other syndication partner is named anywhere on the site or in its documentation, and no partner attribution appears on its pages.
How does Jayde rank results?
By clicks. Jayde calls the method ClickRelevance and describes it as ordering categories and results by those clicked the most by unique searches. There is no link analysis and no documented relevance model. Click-popularity ranking is self-reinforcing, since whatever is at the top collects the clicks that keep it there, and it is easy to manipulate.
Who owns Jayde.com?
The site's footer and About page name iEntry, Inc. of Lexington, Kentucky. There is an unresolved inconsistency: iEntry's own website describes only a B2B email-newsletter business, lists a different Lexington address, and does not mention Jayde. The site was previously run by Jayde Online, Inc. of Winnipeg, Manitoba, and no record of when or how it transferred was found.
When was Jayde founded?
Three different dates appear in three sources and none reconciles them. Jayde's own About page says 1996; ExactSeek's page says the parent company was founded in 1993 and incorporated in early 1998; a 2005 press release says the parent was established in 1998. These may describe an informal start, a site launch and an incorporation respectively, but no source states that, so all three are recorded.
Does Jayde have a privacy policy?
None could be located, along with no data-retention statement and no search-logging disclosure. This matters more than usual here, because ranking by clicks entails logging searches and clicks, and the submission process collects verified business contact details. Without a published policy there is no documented basis on which to assess what Jayde keeps or for how long.
How many sites does Jayde index?
The operator claims more than 2 million business websites. That figure is self-reported and not independently verified. It also measures something different from the page counts published by crawled search engines: these are business listings that owners submitted, not pages a crawler discovered, so the two numbers should never be compared directly.