50 of the Most Useful Websites on the Internet
The web is enormous, and most of us use the same ten websites every day. That is a shame, because some of the most useful corners of the internet are free, ad-light and quietly brilliant. Here are fifty that deserve a bookmark.
We have refreshed this list from the 2015 original: a few of the old favourites have closed or changed beyond recognition, so we kept the ones still going strong and added newer classics. Just type the names into your browser or search engine.
Learn something new
- Wikipedia: the free encyclopedia, in more than 300 languages.
- Khan Academy: free lessons in maths, science, economics and more, from primary school to university level.
- Duolingo: bite-sized language lessons that feel like a game.
- Coursera: university courses online, many free to audit.
- edX: another big library of courses from universities around the world.
- Project Gutenberg: tens of thousands of free e-books whose copyright has expired.
- Internet Archive: old websites, books, films, music and software, preserved.
- OpenStax: free, peer-reviewed textbooks.
- MIT OpenCourseWare: lecture notes, exams and videos from real MIT courses.
- Wolfram Alpha: a computational engine that answers questions with real calculations, from unit conversions to poker hand probabilities.
Everyday problem solvers
- timeanddate.com: time zones, calendars, sunrise times and countdowns.
- XE: live currency conversion.
- OpenStreetMap: a free, community-made map of the world.
- Rome2rio: how to get from anywhere to anywhere, by train, bus, ferry or plane.
- CamelCamelCamel: price history and drop alerts for Amazon products.
- Have I Been Pwned: check whether your email address appeared in a data breach.
- Speedtest: measure your internet connection in seconds.
- Down for Everyone or Just Me: find out whether a website is broken or it is just you.
- Windy: beautiful animated weather maps.
- DeepL: remarkably natural machine translation.
For creative projects
- Canva: drag-and-drop design for posters, social posts and presentations.
- Unsplash: free high-quality photos.
- Wikimedia Commons: millions of freely licensed images, sounds and videos (every photo on Tales Maze comes from here).
- Photopea: a capable image editor that runs in your browser.
- remove.bg: removes the background from a photo automatically.
- Chordify: pulls guitar and piano chords out of songs.
- Freesound: a huge collaborative library of sound effects.
- Coolors: generates colour palettes at the press of a key.
- Google Fonts: free web fonts, the ones this site uses included.
- Excalidraw: a virtual whiteboard for quick hand-drawn sketches.
Get things done
- CloudConvert: converts almost any file format into almost any other.
- iLovePDF: merge, split, compress and convert PDFs.
- WeTransfer: send large files without email attachments.
- Doodle: find a date that works for everyone in the group.
- Trello: boards and cards to organise any project.
- Todoist: a clean, cross-device to-do list.
- Habitica: turns habits into a role-playing game (it was called HabitRPG in 2015).
- AlternativeTo: find alternatives to any app or program.
- archive.today: take a permanent snapshot of a web page.
- Keybr: learn to touch type properly.
For the curious and the probability nerds
- Random.org: true random numbers generated from atmospheric noise rather than an algorithm.
- Wizard of Odds: a mathematician's tables of the house edge for almost every casino game.
- Your Logical Fallacy Is: a gallery of the classic errors in reasoning.
- Radio Garden: spin a globe and listen to live radio from wherever you land.
- TuneIn: thousands of radio stations and podcasts.
- Flightradar24: live map of planes in the sky.
- earth.nullschool.net: a mesmerising live map of global winds and ocean currents.
- Neal.fun: playful interactive pages about space, money and the size of things.
- Godchecker: an encyclopedia of thousands of gods and spirits from world mythology.
- Our World in Data: charts and research on the world's biggest problems.
Why the odds sites made the list
Numbers 41 and 42 are there for a reason. Random.org is a neat way to see what genuine randomness looks like: streaks and clusters appear far more often than intuition expects, which is exactly why people believe a roulette wheel or a lottery draw can be "due". The Wizard of Odds, meanwhile, lays out the house edge of each game in plain tables, from European roulette at about 2.7% to the much steeper odds on some side bets.
Spend ten minutes with either and you will never look at a "system" the same way again. For the full story, read The Science of Luck: 7 Probability Myths Busted, and to see how computers produce the random results behind every modern slot, see the technology behind modern slots and online casinos.
