Useful Websites Most People Don't Know Exist
Useful and obscure websites most people never stumble across.
Aeon
A digital magazine of ideas publishing essays and long-form articles in philosophy, science, society, and the arts from academics and public intellectuals.
Are.na
A platform for collecting and connecting images, links, text and ideas into channels, popular with designers, artists and researchers.
Astral Codex Ten
Scott Alexander's blog covering psychiatry, rationalism, AI, economics, and book reviews with characteristically careful reasoning and steel-manned opposing views.
Atlas Obscura
Collaborative guide to the world's most unusual and overlooked places — over 25,000 destinations curated by a global community of explorers.
Atomic Rockets
A huge reference on realistic spaceship design, space travel physics and settings for science fiction writers and game designers, part of Project Rho.
BLDGBLOG
Geoff Manaugh's blog on architecture, urban speculation and landscape futures, with essays on buildings, cities and the odd ways people shape the world.
Blogs Are Back
A directory for finding and following independent blogs, with topic pages and lists such as personal blogs and writing about technology.
Bored Button
Press a button to be sent to a random, curated, interesting website from across the internet.
Cabinet
A quarterly magazine of art and culture that publishes unusual essays, interviews and curiosities, with a large part of its archive available online.
Copy Paste Character
A simple page of special characters, symbols and punctuation that you can copy with a single click, sorted into handy groups.
cryptii
A modular tool for converting, encoding and decoding text, where you chain together steps such as Base64, Caesar cipher and binary.
Damn Interesting
Long-form, meticulously researched articles on obscure true stories — history, science, and disasters most people have never heard of.
Dan Q
The personal blog of Dan Q, a long-running site that covers technology, the web, geocaching, travel and everyday life, with posts going back many years.
dCode
A large set of tools for solving ciphers, codes, puzzles, number problems and games, with explanations of how each method works.
diamond geezer
A long-running London blog covering transport, local places, statistics and the small details of life in the city, with daily posts.
disassociated.com
A long-running independent blog on digital culture, technology policy and internet commentary, self-publishing since 1997.
Dwitter
A community where people write tiny JavaScript animations and demos in 140 characters or fewer, each one shown running live.
eieio.games
A collection of experimental browser games by Amos Wenger — including a multiplayer game controlled entirely through a shared Google Spreadsheet, a single-pixel multiplayer game, and other absurdist browser-native experiences.
Experiments with Google
A showcase of creative projects built with Google technology, including interactive art, music, web and machine learning experiments, many of them playable.
explain xkcd
A wiki that explains each xkcd comic, including the maths, science and in-jokes, with discussion from fans.
Farnam Street
Shane Parrish's site on mental models, decision-making, and thinking clearly — drawing from business, psychology, philosophy, and history.
Feedbin
A clean, fast RSS reader that also lets you subscribe to email newsletters and read them in the same feed as your other subscriptions.
Flightradar24
Real-time global flight tracking showing the position, altitude, speed, and route of aircraft worldwide using ADS-B transponder data.
Fourmilab
John Walker's long-running site with essays, software and tools, including the well-known Earth and Moon viewers that show the day and night sides of the planet.
Futility Closet
Daily collection of puzzles, curiosities, strange historical facts, and unsolved problems — running continuously since 2005 with no algorithmic filler.
FutureMe
A site for writing a letter to your future self, which is delivered to your inbox on a date you choose, or shared publicly.
Gnoosic
Tell it three bands or artists you like and it suggests others you may enjoy, with an option to rate its suggestions to improve them.
Gwern.net
Gwern Branwen's personal research website containing long-form essays, statistical analyses, and experiments on psychology, AI, pharmacology, and prediction.
Hacker News
Social news site focused on technology and startups run by Y Combinator, famous for high-quality discussion.
Hacker Newsletter
A weekly curated digest of the best links from Hacker News, filtered down from the daily noise into a manageable Sunday read.
Have I Been Pwned
Check if your email or phone has appeared in a data breach.
Heavens-Above
Predicts when satellites, including the International Space Station, will pass over your location, with sky charts and visibility times.
How Normal Am I
An interactive essay that uses your webcam and on-device ML to analyze your face — estimating your age, attractiveness, BMI, and emotional state to reveal how these algorithms work and what assumptions they encode.
Indieblog.page
Discover the IndieWeb one blog post at a time, with a feed of recent posts from independent blogs and a button that sends you to a random one.
Information Is Beautiful
David McCandless's collection of data visualisations and infographics, which turn complicated facts and numbers into clear, striking images.
Internet Game Database (IGDB)
Comprehensive database of video games with metadata, screenshots, and release info.
JustDeleteMe
Directory of direct links and instructions for deleting your account on hundreds of websites and apps.
Kagi
A paid, ad-free search engine that ranks results by quality instead of ad revenue, with tools to boost or block specific domains yourself.
Kiwix
Software and downloads that let you read Wikipedia and other large reference collections offline, on a phone, a computer or a small device.
Kottke
One of the webs longest-running blogs — daily links and commentary on culture, science, and ideas since 1998.
Lapham's Quarterly
A history-focused quarterly that explores each theme through primary sources, with excerpts from writers across the centuries available online.
LegiScan
A cross-jurisdiction legislative tracking engine providing open access to bill texts, voting records, and sponsor data across all 50 US states.
LessWrong
A community blog focused on rationality, decision-making, and AI safety, with a large archive of long-form essays going back over a decade.
Lexaloffle
The home of PICO-8, a fantasy game console with deliberately tiny limits, and a community board where people share small games that you can play in the browser.
Library of Babel
A website inspired by the Borges story that contains every possible page of 3,200 characters, which you can search to find any text you can think of.
Library of Short Stories
Free collection of classic short stories from various authors in a simple reading format.
LibriVox
Free audiobooks of public-domain works, read by volunteers from around the world and available to download or stream.
LittleSis
Database mapping connections between powerful people and organizations.
Lobsters
Invitation-only technology link aggregator with tagging, comment threads, and a focus on technical depth.
Low-tech Magazine
A magazine about the past and the future of low-technology solutions, run on a website that is itself powered by solar energy.
Marginalia Search
Independent search engine that deliberately favors non-commercial, text-heavy, and obscure websites.
Marginal Revolution
Long-running economics blog by Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, covering everything from policy to culture through an economist's lens.
MarineTraffic
Real-time ship tracking service showing the position and details of vessels worldwide using AIS transponder data, with port activity and voyage history.
Messy Nessy Chic
A blog about forgotten places, vintage curiosities, odd history and the quirky side of culture.
Metaculus
A forecasting community where users predict the probability of future events — from elections to AI milestones — and track their own accuracy over time.
Metafilter
One of the oldest community blogs on the internet, with thoughtful long-form discussion since 1999.
Minifeed
A discovery site for small independent blogs, collecting their posts into feeds you can browse by topic or follow.
MLC LLM
A universal LLM deployment engine that compiles models to run natively on laptops, phones, and browsers — the same model, the same weights, running on NVIDIA, AMD, Apple Silicon, or WebGPU.
Monkeytype
A minimalist, customizable typing speed test with live stats and dozens of modes.
Music-Map
Type in a musician and see a map of similar artists, where closer names are more alike, with links to explore further.
Namechk
Checks username and domain availability across dozens of social networks and platforms simultaneously.
Nautilus
A science and culture magazine organized around themes, publishing interconnected articles across biology, physics, psychology, and philosophy each issue.
Neal.fun
Collection of interactive web experiments and games by developer Neal Agarwal.
Neocities
Free web hosting for hand-built HTML sites, in the spirit of GeoCities, with a browse page and tools for finding other people's creations.
Nicky Case
Nicky Case's portfolio of explorable essays — interactive simulations and games that teach game theory, network effects, cognitive bias, and mental health through systems you can play with and break.
NPR Text-Only
A stripped-down, text-only version of NPR's news site with no images, scripts or autoplay, which loads almost instantly.
Numbeo
The world's largest crowd-sourced database of city and country data covering cost of living, quality of life, crime, healthcare, and traffic indices.
OEIS
The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences: type in a few numbers and it tells you which sequences they match, along with formulas, references and code.
Old Book Illustrations
A curated archive of high-quality public domain engravings, woodcuts, and lithographs sourced from historical books and publications.
ooh.directory
A curated directory of thousands of blogs, sorted by topic and place, with each one reviewed by hand and showing when it last posted.
PersonalSit.es
A directory of personal websites and blogs, with a mix of designers, developers, writers and hobbyists, each shown with a preview.
Privnote
Creates a one-time link containing a private note that permanently self-destructs after being read once — no account required. Optionally set a passphrase, expiry time, or receive an email notification when the note is read.
Project Gemini
The home of Gemini, a lightweight internet protocol for text-focused content that sits between Gopher and the modern web, with links to servers and clients.
Quanta Magazine
An editorially independent online publication covering developments in mathematics, physics, biology, and computer science for a general but intellectually serious audience.
Rewind AI Web Tools Directory
Curated listing of AI and productivity tools organized by use case.
Ribbonfarm
Venkatesh Rao's long-form blog exploring organizational behavior, technology, and culture through an idiosyncratic systems-thinking lens.
Search My Site
A search engine and directory for independent blogs, personal sites and digital gardens, which ranks sites without ads higher and is open source.
SearXNG
A public instance of the open-source metasearch engine that aggregates results from dozens of search engines without tracking you.
Shorpy
A blog of high-resolution historical photographs, mostly from the United States, each one posted with a caption and a lively comments section.
Slashdot
One of the internet's oldest tech news and discussion sites, still running — "News for Nerds" since 1997, with a distinctive threaded comment system.
Spacehey
MySpace-inspired social network that lets users build fully customizable profile pages with HTML and CSS.
SpaceWeather.com
News and information about solar flares, auroras, meteor showers, near-Earth asteroids and other events in space that affect Earth.
Submarine Cable Map
An interactive map of the undersea cables that carry the internet between continents, with details on each cable and where it lands.
Techmeme
Algorithmically-curated tech news aggregator that surfaces the top stories across hundreds of sources in a single scannable page.
The Browser
A daily digest of five links hand-picked for quality writing — essays, journalism, and criticism curated rather than algorithmically ranked.
The Forest
A one-button portal into the weird, personal, and overlooked corners of the internet.
theindex.fyi
A maintained index of the indie web and small web directories, search engines and aggregators, with a note on which ones are still active.
The Kid Should See This
Curated collection of smart, curiosity-sparking videos for kids and curious adults.
The Marginalian
Maria Popova's long-running blog of essays exploring ideas at the intersection of science, art, philosophy, and literature, drawing on a vast reading life.
The Million Dollar Homepage
A frozen piece of internet history: in 2005 a student sold one million pixels for one dollar each to fund his studies, and the page has been preserved as it was.
The Pudding
Collection of visual essays explaining cultural and data-driven topics interactively.
This Person Does Not Exist
Generates a photorealistic face of a person who has never existed using StyleGAN neural network.
tilde.club
The original 'tilde' server, a shared Unix machine where each member gets a personal web page at a ~username address.
tilde.town
A shared Linux server run as a friendly community, where members get a home page, a shell account and a place to learn and build things together.
TinEye
Reverse image search engine that finds where an image appears online.
Type Here
A distraction-free online typewriter with mechanical key sounds, an aged paper aesthetic, and no save button — everything you type exists only in the moment and disappears when you close the tab.
Uses This
Short interviews asking creative and technical people one simple question: what hardware and software do you use to get things done?
Vintage Everyday
A large collection of vintage photographs and curiosities from the 19th and 20th centuries, with themed posts on fashion, travel, people and daily life.
VirusTotal
Upload any file or paste any URL and VirusTotal scans it simultaneously against over 70 antivirus engines and security vendors, returning a detailed report on whether anything flagged it as malicious.
Wait But Why
Tim Urban's long-form illustrated blog tackling big questions in science, society, and human nature with deep research, hand-drawn diagrams, and irreverent humor.
Wander Console
A small script that site owners can add to their own pages so visitors can bounce to another site in the community, designed to help people discover the small web.
Webamp
A pixel-accurate web recreation of Winamp 2.9 that plays MP3s from your local files or URLs — including the equalizer, playlist editor, visualizations, and support for thousands of original Winamp skins.
WebLLM
In-browser LLM inference powered by WebGPU — runs full language models entirely inside Chrome or Edge with no server, no API key, and no data leaving your device.
WhatTheFont
Tool that identifies fonts from uploaded images using visual matching.
Wiby Search
Search engine for the old web — indexes only simple, hand-crafted websites without JavaScript or tracking.
WiFi SPC
Community-powered global directory of free WiFi hotspots with location search, daily updates, and coverage across more than 200 countries.
Wikisource
A free library of source texts, including books, documents and historical papers, transcribed and proofread by volunteers.
Wikivoyage
A free, collaborative travel guide covering destinations around the world, with practical advice on getting there, staying safe and what to see.
Window to the Universe
Educational site explaining space science, Earth systems, and astronomy concepts.
Wolfram MathWorld
A large mathematics encyclopedia with entries on thousands of topics, from geometry and number theory to topology and probability.
World Wide Words
Michael Quinion's site on the English language, with articles on word origins, new coinages and the stories behind everyday phrases.
xkcd
Randall Munroe's webcomic covering science, mathematics, programming, linguistics, and culture — with 2,900+ strips ranging from genuinely instructive to profoundly absurd, updated three times a week.
Ye Olde Blogroll
A hand-curated list of more than a thousand independent blogs and personal sites that are still being updated, collected as a reminder that blogs are the soul of the web.