Hall of fame

Fly out through a mapped model of our stellar neighbourhood until the Sun is one unremarkable dot among thousands.

The Myers-Briggs-flavoured test everybody has taken, with a four-letter verdict and profile pages that are unnervingly specific.

The original tile-merging game, written in a weekend and responsible for an enormous amount of lost 2014.

Starts as one button beside a dying fire and quietly becomes something much larger. Best played without reading anything about it first.

Be a cell, eat smaller cells, flee larger ones and split to ambush. The game that invented this entire genre in 2015.

The lab page of the psychologist whose completely static images refuse to stop rotating, added to for over twenty years.

The Swiss Ephemeris people: the technical reference the whole field quietly runs on, plus free charts and very long interpretation texts.

One astronomy image a day since 1995, each with a paragraph from an actual astronomer and an archive going back decades.

A gazetteer of the world's odd corners — bone chapels, abandoned observatories, restaurants built inside caves.

The industry's awards site, and the fastest way to find out what the ambitious end of web design is doing this month.

Engineering essays with live diagrams you drag — gears, lenses, GPS, sound — each the clearest thing ever written on its subject.

Monkeys pop balloons along a fixed path, and the upgrade trees behind that sentence are deep enough to justify the reputation.

A collage assembled entirely from GeoCities pages — every GIF, marquee and tiled background salvaged and put back to work.

Two near-identical interfaces, one of them subtly wrong. Getting past the third level takes an unreasonable amount of care.

Cut-out cats rain down and bounce off the bottom of the screen, and you can grab one and fling it at the others.

The default chess address for most of the planet, with a bot for every skill level and puzzles that will quietly humble you.

Fourteen small experiments — spectrogram, harmonics, arpeggios — that explain how music works by letting you break it.

Click the cookie, buy grandmas, buy portals, accidentally summon something. The game that turned incrementals into a genre.

The site every school network forgot to block, still hosting Run 3, Fireboy and Watergirl and almost no actual mathematics.

Hit the space bar for a five-colour palette, lock the ones you like, hit it again. The whole tool is that loop.

Field reports and photographs of American shopping centres in decline, written by people who cared about this long before it was an aesthetic.

Search without the profile building, plus bang shortcuts that fire your query straight at another site. Type an exclamation and w for Wikipedia.

Gamified courses in dozens of languages, plus the guilt engine keeping most people's streaks technically alive.

A rotating globe with every wind current on Earth drawn as moving lines, and layers underneath for ocean currents, particulates and the jet stream.

Every Google emoji mashup, searchable — pick two and get the official illustrated hybrid back as a PNG.

Every emoji with its meaning, its history and how it renders on each platform. Settles arguments in one link.

A scatterplot of six thousand music genres you have never heard of, each one clickable for a sample and a list of its bands.

The largest collection of live nature cams anywhere: bear falls, puppy rooms, osprey nests and coral reefs, all free and always running.

Every aircraft in the sky right now on one map. Click any of them for the route, the aircraft type and how far it still has to go.

Opens as a dismal educational maths game about a frog eating flies, and then keeps going somewhere else entirely. Say nothing more.

Hans Rosling's animated bubble chart of the world, still the fastest cure for being wrong about global development.

Broken telephone with drawings: a sentence becomes a picture becomes a sentence, and the album at the end is the whole payoff.

The GIF search engine everything else plugs into, still the fastest route to the exact reaction you have in mind.

Positive news published daily since 1997, back when the idea sounded like a joke rather than a business model.

Grey text on beige, no images, and the best comment threads anywhere about how technical things actually work. Search covers twenty years.

Mash any keys and perfectly formatted code appears character by character, exactly as in every hacking scene ever filmed.

Type an email address and find out which breaches it turned up in. Troy Hunt's index now covers billions of leaked accounts.

Reaction time, sequence memory, the chimp test and verbal memory, each scored against millions of other people's attempts.

Every known way to lace and tie a shoe, diagrammed by one Australian for over two decades, including a knot he invented himself.

Free illustrated repair manuals for phones, laptops, cars and appliances, plus teardowns that name and shame every glued-in battery.

Combine two things to make a third, forever, until you have coaxed a language model into inventing something absurd.

Classic Mac OS booting instantly in a browser, with the software of the period already installed and ready to open.

Step-by-step build guides for anything from a bookshelf to a plasma cutter, written by the people who actually made the thing.

Books, films, software, concerts and the web itself, archived at a scale no other institution has come close to.

The indie storefront where thousands of experiments run free in the browser, and where the deeply strange ones are the point.

Space the letters of a word by eye, then see the typographer's answer laid over the top of yours. Reliably humbling.

Stick-figure RPG that has been landing daily jokes since 2003, wrapped around a combat and item system far deeper than the drawings imply.

The one most people name as the best tower defence: four tower types, hero units and levels that reward replanning.