Centralizing hate groups onto one site and providing a critical context is the foundation of Goldman's endeavor.

"If you take cockroaches and you shine a light on them, they freak out. They scurry away," he says.

As part of this effort, Hatewatch has incorporated Real Audio interviews with both promoters and fighters of hate onto the site.

Goldman says he hopes visitors will use the site to get informed and as a "pedagogical tool" for children.

The site currently attracts about 700 individual users each day with hits totalling 3,000 to 4,000.

But Hale says he believes the same exposure Goldman hopes will help marginalize hate actually contributes to the spread of his message.

"We feel he's doing us a favor," he says.

Goldman denies that his site facilitates communication among the groups.

"I have never believed that Hatewatch empowers racists to work more," he says. "Anyone with a search engine and knowing one page can find everything else."

Tests seem to bear this out. Many sites already link to each other and a Yahoo search for the words "white pride" turned up 427 entries earlier this week.

Most of the Web publishers whose pages are listed on Hatewatch say this is not how their supporters find them.

"Hatewatch hasn't been sending us much traffic of late and so we've dropped our links to it," says Jeff Vos of the Cybernet Nationalist Group, which promotes an anti-gay agenda.

"It seems as if most people prefer to use other means to finding sites like ours rather than going through 'hate monitoring' sites--which are also likely monitoring them as well," he says.

But even though the site does not seem to aid the communication of Hate groups, Ganz says the ADL questions the practice of live-linking to these sites.

"We see there being no point in making it any easier to find these groups," she says. "It's easy enough to find them anyway. We don't encourage people to contact these groups."