Good on a phone

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.

Nature recordings from named places with coordinates attached, so you know exactly which rainforest you are sitting in.

Thousands of public webcams pointed at squares, harbours, volcanoes and building sites, some with archives stretching back decades.

The 2001 humour portal that somehow still updates, with the same mix of clips, pictures and questionable taste.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

Found VHS footage cut into collages by a collective that also owns most of the world's remaining copies of Jerry Maguire.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Three infinite layers of colour falling forever over a low drone, from the net artist behind half the web's cult toys.

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

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.

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

US government training films liberated from federal vaults. Sincere, badly acted, and occasionally about surviving a nuclear attack.

A fidget spinner you flick with the mouse, with physics good enough that people leave it running in a spare tab.

Two dozen SVG generators in one place — noise, grain, blobs, dots, gradients, mesh — all exportable and all free.

British gift shop with a taste for the daft and mildly rude, plus the occasional genuinely good bit of kit hidden among it.

A toy about synchronisation — a few hundred blinking dots that agree on a rhythm with no conductor anywhere.

A fortnightly digest of measurable global progress on disease, energy and conservation, with a source for every claim.

A flag revealed six squares at a time, which sounds straightforward until you meet the fourth consecutive tricolour.

The pipe game its own creator pulled from the app stores for being too addictive, rebuilt and still ruining afternoons.

Aircraft moving across a live map with routes, altitudes and speeds. Startling once you notice how much is up there at once.

Flight tracking with the operational detail attached: delays, diversions, taxi times and the filed route rather than a tidy curve.