The information gathered from rare B decays is very useful to determine the elements of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix and is essential for the study of the CP violation mechanism of the Standard Model. It is also sensitive to new physics beyond standard model for the additional contributions from the unknown heavy virtual particles in the b to s penguin loop. Because of the interference between decay amplitudes, large direct CP violation could be expected. In this talk, we will report the recent experimental observations in rare B decays from the two B factories, BABAR and Belle. These results can be categorized into two-body mesonic pseudoscalar-pseudoscalar, (axial)vector-pseudoscalar, and (axial)vector-vector decays, and three-body baryonic decays. Findings for the direct CP violation will be also addressed.