A bored button is the simplest idea on the internet. There is one button. You press it and it takes you to a website you did not choose. If you do not like where you ended up, you press it again. There are no menus, no search box and nothing to decide, which is exactly the point when you are too bored to pick something yourself.
It is not really random, though. Behind almost every button is a list that somebody put together by hand, one site at a time. The button only decides which one you see next. That is the good part: you get the surprise without ending up somewhere sketchy.
There are quite a few of these buttons around now, and they are not all the same. Some send you to silly toys, some to strangers' blogs and some to a street on the other side of the world. Here are the ones we keep going back to, plus two that are hidden on this site.
The classic buttons
The Bored Button is the one most people mean when they search for it. One button, one fun website from its list, and another one when you press it again. If you have never tried a button like this, start here.
The Useless Web does the same thing with a stricter rule: every site on its list has to be pointless. Expect sites that do one odd thing and nothing else. Most of them take ten seconds. A few will quietly take twenty minutes.
Click the Red Button has a big red button and more than 360 hand-picked sites behind it. Cloudhiker is the closest thing to the old StumbleUpon: hit the button and get flung to a corner of the web someone actually chose.
Buttons for people who like reading
Not every button has to lead to a toy. Kagi Small Web shows you one fresh post from somebody's personal blog. No ads and no algorithm, just a stranger writing about their week. It is oddly calming.
Wikipedia is where things get properly random. WikiRoulette drops you on any of Wikipedia's millions of articles, and WikiTok turns the same idea into a scroll that never ends. If you would rather learn a skill you will never need, the WikiHow randomizer picks a how-to article instead.
Buttons that take you somewhere
Random Street View puts you on a street somewhere in the world. Most of the time it is an empty road in a country you have never visited, which is more interesting than it sounds.
IMG_0001 is a stranger one. It plays old iPhone home videos from YouTube at random, the kind nobody ever bothered to give a title. They are raw, unedited and usually seen by almost no one. It feels a little like looking through a stranger's window.
If you would rather play something, RandoPlay asks for your device and mood and hands you one browser game. Or skip the questions and let it decide.
The two buttons on Bored.com
Bored.com has its own version, and it is easy to miss. The search bar at the top of the page, the one that says "I'm bored...", has a small shuffle button on its left end. Press it and you land on one of the more than 1,600 sites in our directory. We picked every one of them, so wherever you end up, somebody here thought it was worth a visit.
The second one is less polite. In the bottom left corner sits a sleepy eye that watches you scroll. Poke it and it gets annoyed, then hands out your punishment: a slot machine that spins through the same directory and stops on a site or a game from the bored arcade. Hit "Accept fate" to go there, or "Nope" to spin again. We will not tell anyone how many times you pressed "Nope".
Want to pick it yourself?
A surprise is fun until you land on the same kind of site three times in a row. When that happens, browse a category instead. Random rabbit hole collects every button in this post and a couple more. Pointless portals lists whole collections of odd sites, and Pointless fun is the place for single sites that do one silly thing well.
Know a good button we missed? Tell us and we will give it a few hundred presses before we add it.