The public directory is live

There are 41 people named John Smith with pages on NamesRanker. Before today, finding the right one meant opening each page until you guessed correctly. The public directory changes that: search any name, and every professional appears with a descriptor that tells you which one you want before you click.

/names is now a first-class public surface — and it's powered by fuzzy Postgres search under the hood.

Search 'smith', find the right Smith

Type smith and you get every John, Maya, and Alex who shares it — each with a descriptor. The illustrator in Chicago, the engineer in Berlin, the coach in Austin: one scan of the list and you know which page to open. Typo tolerance is built in, so smit and smithy both land on the same results.

The directory doesn't rank anyone against each other — it disambiguates. That's the whole point: same-name pages are told apart by descriptor, not by fighting.

Descriptors do the disambiguation

Two identical pages named john-smith would cannibalize each other's rankings — Google picks one and buries the other. The directory (and the slug engine behind it) avoids that by design: each page optimizes for name plus descriptor, so john-smith-illustrator and john-smith-engineer target different queries entirely.

In the directory, that same descriptor becomes the deciding line. It's not a tag added for decoration — it's the keyword the page is built to win, surfaced exactly where someone is comparing options.

What's on a directory card

• Name and descriptor: the query the page targets, at a glance.
• One-line headline: what they do and who they help — enough to qualify before you click.
• Location and links: where they are and where they live on the web.
• A direct path to claim: every card links to the page, and the claim flow is one click away for the unclaimed.

A directory that makes the platform stronger

Every directory listing is a live page, so the directory grows as professionals claim names — and it feeds them back: appearing in /names means a new surface where clients, journalists, and collaborators find you before they ever open Google.

Search for your own name in the directory. If your page isn't there, it should be.