Random Website Generator

The Random Website Generator has one button. Press it and a site picked at random from a list of 125 hand-chosen websites opens in a new browser tab. There's nothing to fill in and no account. It exists for the moment when you're bored, have ten minutes, and want the internet to surprise you with something better than the same three feeds.

How it works

Every press picks one URL from the list with equal probability and opens it with your browser's normal "open in new tab" behavior, so this page stays put and you can keep pressing. Because the pick is uniform and the list is fixed, you'll see repeats once you've been at it for a while; with 125 entries, the odds of a repeat pass 50% somewhere around the thirteenth press. There's no history, no "skip" and no category filter. If your browser blocks pop-ups, allow them for this site, otherwise the new tab may be silently swallowed.

What kind of sites are on the list

This isn't a crawl of the whole web, and it isn't a list of "useless" sites either, though a few of those are in there. It's a curated mix that leans toward things you can actually spend time on. Roughly, the list breaks down like this:

• Pointless but fun – the Bored Button, Staggering Beauty, Falling Falling, Zoomquilt, Patatap, Draw a Stickman, Hacker Typer and Scream Into the Void. These are the "take me to a useless website" picks.
• Science and live data – NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day, Quanta Magazine, ScienceDaily, NOAA, Flightradar24, EarthCam, Worldometers and Radio Garden, which lets you spin a globe and tune into any live radio station.
• Games and puzzles – GeoGuessr, Sporcle, Coolmath Games, Jigsaw Planet, Project Euler, Riddles.com and the original Wordle clone at wordle.net.
• Art, photos and design – Colossal, Shorpy's historical photo archive, Rare Historical Photos, MoMA, Unsplash, Pixabay, Dribbble, Designspiration and Film Grab for movie stills.
• Reading – Wait But Why, Letters of Note, xkcd, Open Culture, the Internet Archive, the Library of Congress digital collections, the Poetry Foundation and sacred-texts.com.
• Learning – Duolingo, Freerice, Vocabulary.com, TypingClub, Scratch and Storyline Online.
• Handy tools – Hemingway Editor, Mathway, SuperCook and MyFridgeFood (recipes from what's in your fridge), OneLook reverse dictionary, TinEye reverse image search and WhatTheFont.

The list was assembled by hand rather than scraped, and it hasn't been rebuilt from scratch since it was written, so a small number of the older entries have changed hands or gone offline. If a press lands you on a parked domain, press again; the rest of the list is solid.

Ways people use it

• Killing time without doomscrolling. This is the main use. A random tab from this list is more likely to be a live radio station in Reykjavík or a jigsaw than another feed.
• Finding things to bookmark. Many of these sites (Radio Garden, Forgotify, Zoomquilt, the Internet Archive) are the kind you'd never search for by name but happily keep once you've seen them.
• Design and writing inspiration. Designers use the art entries and the odd interactive sites as a change of visual diet; writers hit Letters of Note or Wait But Why and end up with an idea.
• Classroom and study breaks. Because the list is family-safe and includes learning sites, teachers use it as a five-minute reward that doesn't turn into YouTube.

If you want something narrower

The Random Wikipedia Page Generator does the same one-button trick but only within Wikipedia, which is better when you want to learn rather than play. The Random YouTube Video Generator serves a random video instead of a site, and the Random Subreddits Generator picks a community to read. If you'd rather see a plain URL on screen than have it open automatically, the Random Link Generator works that way. For party games that have nothing to do with browsing, try Truth or Dare or browse all fun, party and decision tools.