Random Site Finder

About the doors

Random Site Finder is one button. Press it and a real website opens in a new tab: something strange, useful or beautiful that your feed was never going to show you.

Every door is real

Most random-website buttons make up an address and hope for the best. This one doesn't. Every door leads to a site from a list put together by hand, around 1,500 of them, in nine rooms:

A site only gets a door after it has been visited and checked: it has to load, be what it says it is, and not be a parked domain, a spam page or a redirect to a social network.

Checked every morning

Websites die quietly. So every morning an automated checker knocks on every door on the list. A site that fails three mornings in a row is taken out of the rotation, and if it is still gone two weeks later, it is retired. Retired sites get another knock every three months; the ones that answer come back.

Found a door that won't open? Press broken? next to it under "Where you've been" and it gets checked straight away.

Genuinely random

Each press is a fair draw from every site currently on the list, made with a cryptographic random number generator, the same kind used to make encryption keys. There is no algorithm learning what you like and no weighting. The one rule: the last ten doors you opened are skipped, so the same one doesn't come up twice in a row.

What a door isn't

We don't run the sites behind the doors, and a door isn't an endorsement. Each site belongs to its owners and has its own rules and privacy practices. We open them without telling them where you came from.

Keeping it free

Random Site Finder is free and has no accounts. To pay its way it may show ads, served by Google. Ads never decide which door opens. The details are in the privacy policy.

Say hello

Know a site that deserves a door? Run one that's listed and want it changed or removed? Get in touch.