The internet used to be full of websites that existed for no reason at all. Most of them are gone, but the best ones survived, and a new generation of odd little sites keeps appearing. These are the thirty we open when we have ten minutes and no plan.
Every site here is free, works in a normal browser, and needs no account. We check the links every month, so nothing on this list will send you to a parked domain. Pick a section and start clicking.
Pure nonsense
1. The Useless Web. One big button. Press it and you land on a random pointless website. Press it again. This is the front door to everything else on this list.
2. Bored Button. The same idea with a red button and a bigger pool of games and toys. If The Useless Web runs dry, this one will not.
3. Eel Slap. Swipe your mouse across the screen and a man gets slapped with an eel in slow motion. Smooth, satisfying and exactly as stupid as it sounds.
4. Cat Bounce. A page of bouncing cats you can grab and fling. There is a button that makes it rain cats. You will press it.
5. Pointer Pointer. Hold your mouse still anywhere and a photo appears of a real person pointing directly at your cursor. Nobody knows how many photos it has. It never misses.
6. Pug in a Rug. A pug wrapped in a rug. Stay on the page and you get promoted through increasingly silly ranks for honouring the pug.
7. Long Doge Challenge. Scroll down a doge that never ends, collect wows, hunt for secrets. Then try to print it.
8. Is It Christmas?. One word, in your own language. It says no every day except one. Bookmark it and check back in December.
Toys you cannot stop poking
9. Google Gravity. Mr.doob's classic: the Google homepage collapses under gravity and you can throw the pieces around. Still the most searched weird site in our directory.
10. Koalas to the Max. Hover over a circle and it splits into four. Keep going and a koala appears out of the dots. Then do it again with your own photo.
11. Silk. Drag your mouse and glowing threads spin into symmetrical patterns with calming music. Ten years old and still hypnotic.
12. Zoomquilt. A hand-painted picture that zooms forever, each scene melting into the next. Put it on a second screen and leave it running.
13. Patatap. Every key on your keyboard plays a sound and fires an animated shape. Mash the keys for a minute and you have accidentally made music.
14. Bongo Cat. Tap your keyboard and the meme cat plays bongos, piano or marimba along with you.
15. WebGL Fluid Simulation. Bright, swirling liquid that follows your finger or mouse. It is physics, technically, and it is impossible to stop.
16. Jackson Pollock by Miltos Manetas. Move the mouse and paint drips; click to change colour. Anyone can make a Pollock, which is either the joke or the point.
Weird games
17. Find the Invisible Cow. Turn your sound on. Move the pointer until the shouting gets loudest, then click. Yes, it is a cow. No, you cannot see it.
18. The Password Game. Choose a password. Now it needs a number. Now a Roman numeral that multiplies to 35. Now the current moon phase as an emoji. Now you must feed the chicken. It gets worse.
19. Draw a Perfect Circle. Draw one circle freehand and get a percentage score. You will not accept your first score.
20. I'm Not a Robot. Forty-eight levels of CAPTCHA, each stranger than the last, that slowly stop testing whether you are human and start testing whether you are patient.
21. Stimulation Clicker. A clicker game that buries your screen in videos, sounds and pop-ups the more you click. It is a joke about being online, told by making you be online.
22. Gartic Phone. The telephone game with drawing: write a sentence, draw the one you receive, caption the drawing you get back. Free, works on phones, the best party game of the list.
Rabbit holes
23. Floor796. A gigantic hand-drawn animation of one floor of a space station, crammed with pop-culture cameos. Zoom in anywhere and lose an hour finding them.
24. Library of Babel. Every possible page of text, 3,200 characters at a time, already exists in here. Search for a sentence you wrote and it will show you the book it was always in.
25. If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel. A scale model of the solar system where the Moon is a single pixel. Scroll right. Keep scrolling. That is how much nothing there is.
26. Notable People. A world map that shows, for every town, the most notable person born there. Zoom into where you grew up. It is the most visited page on this whole site, and once you try it you will see why.
27. WindowSwap. Someone's real window view, somewhere in the world, with the sound of their street. Press the button for another one. Oddly calming.
28. Internet Roadtrip. A never-ending drive through Street View where thousands of strangers vote on every turn, honk the horn and pick the radio station. It has been driving for months.
Weird AI
29. This Rental Does Not Exist. A holiday listing with photos, a host and glowing reviews. None of it is real. Refresh for another one, then try to spot the tells.
30. Say What You See. Google's game that shows you an AI picture and asks you to describe it well enough for the AI to recreate it. It is secretly a prompt-writing course.
Still bored?
There are more than 200 of these in our Fun category, including Infinite Craft, The Deep Sea, Radio Garden, Windows 93, One Million Screenshots and Your AI Slop Bores Me. The ones that cost nothing at all are collected on our free fun websites page, and the top ten by reader clicks sit at the top of the Fun category.
FAQ
Are these websites safe?
Yes. Every site here is a long-running project, usually by one person, with no sign-up and nothing to download. We check each link every month and retire any that die or change hands.
Do they work on a phone?
Almost all of them. Pointer Pointer and Patatap want a mouse and a keyboard, and Floor796 is better on a big screen, but the rest are happy on a phone.
What is the best weird website?
- For a laugh: Eel Slap.
- For an hour you will not get back: Floor796 or The Password Game.
- For showing someone: Notable People, then Pointer Pointer.