What is the equivalent of Netscape’s random site button now?
Google AI:
The spiritual successor to the Netscape “What’s Cool” or random site button—most famously embodied in the 2000s by StumbleUpon—is found today in a variety of “random website generators” and serendipity-driven discovery tools.Here are the best equivalents to the random site button in 2026;Top Random Website Tools (Closest to “Netscape” Feel)
- Cloudhiker (cloudhiker.net): Curates interesting, weird, and awesome websites, providing a high-quality, hand-picked alternative to purely random generators.
- Random Web Button (randomweb.click): Inspired by “The Useless Web,” this site provides a simple button to land on weird, delightful, or absurd websites.
- Random Website Machine (whatsmyip.org/random-website-machine): A classic, simple tool that sends you to a random website from a database of millions.
- The Useless Web (theuselessweb.com): While not purely “random” in the sense of finding any site, it brings you to the best, weirdest corners of the internet in a similar spirit of discovery.
Tag: Web Pages
Three – Alternative / Niche / Lesser Known / Specialized – Search Engines
https://marginalia-search.com/
Explore the Web
Prioritizes non-commercial content
Tools for both search and discovery
Find lost old websites
https://www.mojeek.com/
Looking for different results?
Value your right to privacy?
Trying to escape big tech?
https://wiby.me/
Why Wiby?
In the early days of the web, pages were made primarily by hobbyists, academics, and computer savvy people about subjects they were personally interested in. Later on, the web became saturated with commercial pages that overcrowded everything else. All the personalized websites are hidden among a pile of commercial pages. Google isn’t great at finding them, its focus is on finding answers to technical questions, and it works well; but finding things you didn’t know you wanted to know, which was the real joy of web surfing, no longer happens. In addition, many pages today are created using bloated scripts that add slick cosmetic features in order to mask the lack of content available on them. Those pages contribute to the blandness of today’s web.
Woodstock 99 page – www.woodstock1999.com – Still Up
Woodstock ‘99 website is still operational and feels like getting into a Time Machine from r/InternetIsBeautiful
g2g079
And still more mobile friendly than half the sites out there.
hitemlow
Who would have guessed that having 1 layer to your website would work better than the cascading scaffold of duck tape and flex seal that plagues modern websites?
KingSmizzy
Modern web design: “The text resizes itself so that you can’t zoom in and it’s always awkwardly filling only a third of your screen. Also, enjoy these pop up auto play videos where the x button is smaller than an ants butthole.”
iaiahastur
But, before we get to that, here’s a cookie permission pop-up that hasn’t been resized, so the buttons are below your screen, and you can’t scroll down to them.
AMPed101
HELLO CAN WE SEND YOU NOTIFICATIONS PLEASE?
ladybelle85
My fave pop up are the ones that make you click a button that says… “NO, I don’t like saving money” when you’re turning down their offer.
Lighthouse – Google Site Evaluation Tool
Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool for improving the performance, quality, and correctness of your web apps.
When auditing a page, Lighthouse runs a barrage of tests against the page, and then generates a report on how well the page did. From here you can use the failing tests as indicators on what you can do to improve your app.
Get it at Chrome Web Store
Or check out it’s home page
Here’s some feedback from Lighthouse on this here site:
