Feels like magic

A search engine that crawls the web with its own bot rather than renting results from the giants, and does not track who is searching.

A live tank of sea nettles drifting in blue water, which has been the internet's default calming video for years.

Builds a photo mosaic out of hundreds of your other photos, free to make and zoomable right down to each tile.

A daily logic murder mystery with suspects, weapons and locations, solved by grid deduction in about ten minutes.

Click a dial-up modem, a Nokia ringtone or a VHS rewinder and remember precisely where you were standing at the time.

Type a band and get a cloud of other bands, positioned by how often listeners like both. Crude, ancient and still weirdly effective.

A non-profit, open-source search engine with its own index, curated by volunteers. Results feel nothing like the big engines, which is the point.

Fictional US national park built inside a colossal living organism, documented entirely as tourist brochures and incident reports.

Live tracking for thousands of satellites, with pass predictions for your postcode and a map of everything above you right now.

Type a surname and get where it came from, what it originally meant and where in the world it still clusters.

The official live stream, which for long stretches is simply Earth turning below the space station.

Georeferenced Ordnance Survey sheets you can fade against satellite imagery to see exactly what got demolished.

Run a country by answering one absurd policy dilemma a day, then watch your statistics drift somewhere you did not intend.

The live feed from a deep-sea research ship's remote submersible, complete with scientists audibly losing composure over a new sea cucumber.

Neal Agarwal's collection of one-idea interactive toys, from spending Bill Gates' money to scrolling the whole ocean floor.

Wordle for equations: eight tiles holding one arithmetic statement that has to balance as well as being correct.

Board games rebuilt for a group on a video call, with each person playing from their own phone. Codenames and Wavelength included.

Fast, minimal tracker that pings you the moment a followed episode airs. Open source and deliberately kept lightweight.

Notebooks for building charts in the browser, with a public gallery of thousands you can fork and pull apart.

Physically modelled sea you can retune — wind speed, swell, choppiness — rendering waves that behave properly.

A cabinet of small physics experiments — cloth, water, ragdolls, particles — built by one developer who simply kept going.

Eldritch horror podcast set in an alternate Appalachia where the mountains are older than people and considerably less friendly.

Browses the archives through emulated period browsers, so an old page renders the way it did rather than the way Chrome guesses.

Screenshots of archived GeoCities pages posted automatically, one after another, as a rolling portrait of the amateur web.

Multi-instrument piano roll in a browser, backed by thousands of user sequences you can open, pull apart and ruin.

Gallery of Processing and p5.js sketches where every piece runs in the page and the source is right there to fork.

A research-grade open flight tracking network run by universities, with live maps and the raw historical data behind them.

A sealed glass sphere of water, sand and brine shrimp that you seed and then leave running, ecosystem permitting.

Stanford's model of travel in the Roman world — pick two cities and get the cost, season and days by road or sea.

Write creative code in one pane and watch it run in the next, with no install, no build step and no configuration.

Colourises black-and-white photographs, then lets you steer the result by describing the colours you wanted in words.

MIT's ranking of historically famous people by how many language editions of Wikipedia bother to carry them.

Scroll to unroll an infinite toilet roll and scroll back to wind it up, presented by the artist with a completely straight face.

Noughts and crosses, gomoku and Connect Four against a real stranger, matched in about four seconds with no signup.

Drag mildly biased shapes around a grid and watch a segregated neighbourhood assemble itself without anyone intending it.

Home of Submachine and Daymare Town, Mateusz Skutnik's sketched, wordless worlds built entirely out of corridors and quiet dread.

Every letter on the keyboard fires a sound and a matching shape, and mashing the whole row is the correct way to use it.

Random generators for anything, built from plain text lists you can fork and edit yourself. Thousands of community ones already exist.

Draw a circle with the mouse and get scored on it to one decimal place. Nobody in recorded history has stopped after one attempt.

Draw a circle with one unbroken stroke and get scored on how round it actually was. Nobody beats 97% on a trackpad.

Proper trait questionnaires with the scoring shown, rather than a quiz that decides you are a golden retriever.

Plays YouTube videos with almost no views, which turn out to be mostly a stranger's kitchen and a camera left running.

Colorado's library of physics, chemistry and maths simulations, used in classrooms everywhere and free to meddle with.

Interactive tests designed to find the contradictions in your own stated beliefs, the classic being Battleground God.

Photoshop rebuilt in a tab, opening PSD, XCF and Sketch files. Free, and startlingly close to the real thing.

Sprite and animation editor with onion skinning and a live loop preview, exporting straight to a spritesheet or GIF.

Draw on the grid and it writes the box-shadow monstrosity that renders your sprite with no image file involved at all.

Feed it a photograph and it hands back a pixel-art version, with block size and palette entirely under your control.