Safe at your desk

A search engine that funds tree-planting projects with its profits and publishes regular reports showing where the money went.

Drag left and right to slap a man in the face with an eel, at whatever speed the day seems to call for.

The carbon intensity of the grid across most of the world, coloured by how clean each country's electricity happens to be at this minute.

A museum of Google easter eggs that Google removed — gravity, the barrel roll, the mirrored search — all restored and working.

A fantasy city builder with elves, humans and a genuine research tree, played entirely in a browser tab and unusually pretty.

One sincere, specific compliment per click, written by people rather than generated. For days that have not gone well.

Enormous archive of emoji strings, kaomoji and text arrangements, searchable by whatever you are trying to say.

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

Upload a photograph and it rebuilds the entire thing out of emoji, colour-matched one tile at a time.

Shows you an emoji and starts a timer while you run round the room pointing your phone camera at the real object.

Search, click, paste, with nothing else on the page competing for attention, which is precisely the point.

Two emoji in, one hybrid out, with a randomiser for when you cannot decide which pairing to ruin next.

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

The professional encyclopedia, still going, and a useful second opinion whenever Wikipedia gets contested.

An ASCII horse whose legs continue for as long as you are willing to keep scrolling, which is longer than you think.

Twenty-five years of accidentally poetic English on packaging and signage, photographed across East Asia.

A daily firehose of new escape games from Japanese and indie developers, with walkthroughs in the comments for when you stall.

Fifty million digitised items from European museums, libraries and archives, behind one search box.

Halo-styled arena shooter running in WebGL, with vehicles, sniping and remarkably few visible compromises.

Thousands of strangers claim to have dreamt the same face. Read the whole thing: the explanation is better than the hoax.

Slide across a stack of time zones and see the hour for everyone at once. The quickest way to find a meeting slot that spans continents.

All 2^122 version-four UUIDs listed in order with a working search box, on a page that should not be able to exist.

Obsessive gallery of what strangers keep in their pockets, photographed from above and argued over at remarkable length.

Infinite pixel canvas anybody can paint on live, with no undo, no brief and no moderation queue worth mentioning.

Writing community from 1999 where each subject gets personal essays instead of an encyclopaedia entry, and the tone never settles.

Design a creature from joints and muscles, then watch a genetic algorithm spend hundreds of generations teaching it to limp.

Idle evolution from primordial soup to interstellar empire, with dozens of species branches and an enormous technology tree.

Hand-drawn-looking diagrams that somehow stay legible, with live collaboration and no account. The whiteboard for people who hate whiteboards.

Philosophers dropped into absurd situations, with an explanatory footnote in case you skipped that seminar.

Search any Android app and see the tracking libraries baked into it. The results for the popular ones are routinely grim.

Hundreds of playful projects from Google and creative coders: AI drawing games, music toys and odd interfaces, most of them running in the browser.

Paste a terrifying shell command and it pulls the whole thing apart, annotating every flag from the relevant man page.

The hub for playable posts — effectively the index for the entire genre of learn-by-fiddling essays.

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

An idle game built on actual differential equations, with optional theory levels that teach you the mathematics as you climb.

NASA's real-time 3D model of every mission in flight, letting you ride along with a probe on its actual trajectory.

Home of the GROW games, where you choose an order for a handful of objects and then watch a tiny world assemble or fail.

Ugly, ancient, and still better than everything else at cutting, resizing, reversing and optimising a GIF.

Short, sourced facts arranged so one leads into the next. Built for the specific pleasure of learning something you can repeat.

Full-screen fake update screens for every operating system, including the blue one, with a bar that never finishes.

London has been dragged underground by bats, and the writing is far better than that sentence suggests. Free, endless, faintly sinister.

Accurately drawn birds swearing at each other about territory, mating and the general indignity of being a bird.

Build a circuit and watch current move through it as coloured dots, with an oscilloscope available on any node.

Home repair guides with proper tool lists and honest time estimates, written for somebody already standing in front of the problem.

Who was born today, ranked by fame, drawn from a database heavy with teenagers famous on exactly one platform.

Tens of thousands of fan-run wikis, each documenting one fictional universe in wholly unreasonable depth.

Build a machine from wheels and rods to push a ball into a zone, and accept that it will topple over the first nine times.

The official fantasy football game: free, enormous, and the reason several million people care deeply about a Wolves fixture.