This is a bad post title. I didn’t pick today’s links out of a hat! What I mean is, here are some ways you can find a random site on the World Wide Web. There used to be a bit of magic to just surfing to some site you’d never seen before. Maybe there can be still.
All of these sources are curated to some degree; we aren’t selecting from the entire set of resolvable URLs here, so you’re not going to wind up on slop sites or xhamster by accident or anything. Proceed with an understanding of inherent risk, all the same. Most of these potential routes lead to a page made by the kind of person who thinks it would be cool to be in a curated web directory. But finding any page made by a person is both a feat and a treat these days!
My dear friend Brian introduced me to the cool and clever indieweb services of omg.lol, and while I don’t have an account there myself, I admire the project and the community that seems to have coalesced around it. Thence came url.town, which seems to accrue about one new item per day to its old-fashioned web directory.
You can take advantage of their steady work by adding url.town/random to your bookmarks bar. I tried it just now myself and discovered Super Chart Island, which is “a British history of popular video games, told one sales chart #1 at a time” (where the charts are from forty years ago). I really like that, nice job urltown.
Sporting a front page that looks like a thirty-year-old fansite for your mom’s favorite author (connotation: positive), wiby is a search engine so dedicated to serving as a search engine for old computers that it doesn’t even use HTTPS. This makes their choice to have all their links start purple, rather than starting blue and becoming purple when visited, even more mystifying to me. But I have to respect their efforts!
Wiby focuses on pages, rather than sites, and they say outright that they won’t permit sites that use too much of that newfangled CSS “for cosmetic effect.” There seem to be no restrictions on the use of animated gifs, though. Their bookmarkable URL is wiby.me/surprise and when I tried it just now I found this frankly incredible Web 1.0 site for a celebrity lookalike talent agency in the UK.
I have dabbled in resurrecting old computers myself, and while none of them are currently allowed to play on the real internet, I like knowing that wiby would be there if they were. I can’t include ProtoWeb in this roundup because it doesn’t have a random page selector, but it serves a similar purpose. Maybe I’ll revisit it if I ever decide to try inflicting undeath on the iMac G4 I employ to take up otherwise-usable space on my crafting desk.
But I can include Marginalia, another cottage-grade search engine focused on indexing personal sites. I’m linking to a subdomain there with “old” in the name because their recent redesign kind of breaks my heart. I really liked the original rainbow button in the header menu! I am glad the site’s creator has seen fit to maintain a working archive of the previous look.
The Marginalia random page is a collection of thumbnails rather than a redirect, and I have to tell you that I have not managed to refresh it without getting results that are like… at least 30% Neocities sites. That’s cool by me, but it does offer context for what “personal sites” means in 2026. (You can also get random results from Neocities directly, if you want.)
There are more commercial search engines with stochastic-result options, both enterprise (Kagi Smallweb) and boutique (Searchmysite). But honestly I haven’t really had fun with what they turn up! And anyway, I promised you directories, not engines. So here’s one more of those.
As long as it persists, I will never stop banging the drum for ooh.directory (which this site is not actually qualified to join). Not even Neocities has given me more encouragement that people are still out there writing online about the things they like! You can go to /random there and get three options from its 2400 handpicked blogs, all of which were at least active enough to be satisfactory as of the last few years.
I couldn’t even get through checking those results today without ending up subscribed to a blog that was new to me, run by a fervent Canadian Luddite. From other subscriptions I found there in the last few years, I’ve learned about restaurants in Singapore, urbanism in Cedar Rapids, the carving process for wooden spoons, and the history of MiniDisc players. And also many, many nerdy games.
I don’t know how the directory’s creator Phil Gyford feels about all the thankless work he’s put into the directory by now; I can’t imagine he sees any direct rewards from it. But that work has offered me a sense of pleasant discovery that I have dearly missed in the last ten terrible years online.
We don’t have to let social media convince us that bumping into a stranger on the internet is always the start of a Saw trap for the psyche. There are still dice in the cup that won’t take your hand off just for rolling. That’s the somewhat random moral from Kaijuville. Let’s not get stepped on today.
