Weird websites that are still worth a click
There was a stretch of internet history when people emailed each other links to pages that did absolutely nothing. Most of those are gone now. A handful survived and still work exactly the way they did on day one, and those are the ones collected here.
Everything below runs in your browser with no account and nothing to install. We've sorted them by the flavour of weirdness: sites that look back at you, windows onto somewhere else, pointless toys, and pages that try to show you how big (or how deep) things really are.
Websites that look back at you
Normally you look at a website. With these, it's the other way round: the page reacts to you, puts you somewhere, or answers back. The first one is ours, and we're not going to pretend otherwise.
simple rankingours
You open it and you've already been ranked against roughly 8.3 billion living people, somewhere in the bottom half. There's one row for every person alive, and the list grows in real time as people are born, using UN figures, so scrolling to the end is not an option. No tutorial, no sign-up: points shift according to rules nobody wrote down, and the list addresses you in a flat, clerical voice that occasionally lies. We made it.
Pointer Pointer
Studio Moniker, 2012
Leave your mouse still anywhere on the screen and a second later you get a photo of someone pointing at exactly that spot. They're real photos of people who have no idea they're pointing at your cursor. That's the whole thing, and it's enough.
Your World of Text
Andrew Badr, 2009
An endless sheet of text shared by everyone who's on it. Type anywhere and other people watch your letters appear live, just as you see theirs. Wander far enough and you'll find conversations, ASCII drawings and years of half-finished nonsense.
Staggering Beauty
A black worm on a white background that follows your mouse. Move slowly and it sways politely. Shake it hard and the whole page loses its mind. Skip this one if flashing lights bother you.
Windows onto the rest of the world
These don't make anything up. They show you something happening right now somewhere else, which is exactly why they're so hard to close.
WindowSwap
Sonali Ranjit and Vaishnav Balasubramaniam, 2020
Short clips filmed out of people's home windows all over the world, with the street noise or birdsong left in. It started during lockdown, when nobody could go anywhere. One click and you're in another city, at another time of day.
Radio Garden
A globe covered in green dots, each one a live radio station. Spin the planet, stop on a town in Mongolia or Chile, and hear whatever's playing there right now. It's the quickest way to find out what the morning sounds like on the other side of the world.
earth nullschool
Cameron Beccario
The whole planet's wind, drawn as thousands of moving threads on a globe and refreshed from real weather data every few hours. Whenever a hurricane shows up in the news, this is one of the first places people go to watch it spin.
Toys with no point at all
No goal, no score, no ending. Just something to poke that reacts in a way you didn't quite expect.
The Useless Web
Tim Holman
One big button that says 'Please' and sends you to a random useless website. It's the front door to a lot of the sites on this page, plus plenty more you haven't seen. Dangerous if you have a deadline.
Eel Slap
A man stares into the camera. You drag your mouse side to side and slap him with an eel. It's a single video that scrubs back and forth with your hand, and there is nothing else to it.
Koalas to the Max
Vadim Ogievetsky
You start with one big circle. Hover over it and it splits into four smaller ones, which split again, and again, until a koala photo appears. Oddly one of the most satisfying things you can do with a mouse.
Patatap
Jono Brandel
Every key on your keyboard plays a different sound and fires off a burst of colour. Hit a few in a row and it starts to sound like a track. The space bar switches to a new set of sounds.
Weave Silk
Yuri Vishnevsky
Draw a line and the page mirrors it and turns it into glowing strands of something like silk. Even if you can't draw, it comes out looking good. It's genuinely hard to make anything ugly here.
This Is Sand
Pour coloured sand from the top of the screen and watch it pile up in layers, like those souvenir sand bottles. There's no objective. You just build dunes and swap colours whenever you feel like it.
Zoomquilt
Nikolaus Baumgarten, 2004
An infinite zoom through paintings by a group of illustrators, each one hidden inside the last. It was all done by hand, long before AI images were a thing. You can control the speed with your mouse or the arrow keys.
Huge numbers and impossible scale
Some numbers don't mean anything until you can scroll through them. Most of these come from Neal Agarwal, who has spent years building exactly this kind of thing at neal.fun.
Spend Bill Gates' Money
Neal Agarwal
You've got Bill Gates' fortune and a shop that sells everything from burgers to mansions to sports teams. You keep buying and the balance barely moves. Nothing explains that much money better.
The Deep Sea
Neal Agarwal
Scroll down through the ocean one metre at a time and see what lives at each depth. The light runs out early, and after that it's a very long way down in the dark. Reaching the bottom takes longer than you'd guess.
The Size of Space
Neal Agarwal
It starts with an astronaut and keeps pulling back: the Moon, Earth, the Sun, then bigger and bigger stars. Every step shrinks the last one to a dot. It puts an actual size on words we use without thinking.
Frequently asked questions
- What is the weirdest website on the internet?
- There's no single winner, it depends what gets you. Pointer Pointer and Eel Slap usually win on pure absurdity, and simple ranking on the strange feeling of opening a site and finding yourself already ranked against everyone alive.
- What are some strange websites to visit when bored?
- For a quick hit, try The Useless Web, which drops you on a random pointless site. For something longer, Radio Garden, WindowSwap or The Deep Sea will eat an hour before you notice.
- Are these websites safe?
- They're well-known sites that have been around for years, they don't ask for personal details and there's nothing to download. Staggering Beauty has strong flashing, so avoid it if you're sensitive to that.
- Do I need to sign up for any of them?
- No. They all work straight from your browser, phone included, though Pointer Pointer and Koalas to the Max are more fun with a mouse.
- Why are there so many useless websites?
- Because plenty of people code for fun, to test an idea or just to make friends laugh. A few of those experiments went viral by accident, and their makers have kept them running for over a decade.