Should See This: A Hand-Picked Tour of the Interesting Web

Should See This is a collection of websites that a person thought you should see. That is the whole model, and after twenty years of algorithmic feeds it feels close to radical. No engagement optimization, no infinite scroll, no ranking signal beyond somebody’s judgment that a thing is good.

You open it intending to glance. You close nine tabs later.

What is Should See This?

The interesting web did not go away. It got harder to find. Search results skew toward whoever invested most in ranking, social feeds optimize for reaction rather than quality, and the small strange sites that made the early internet worth wandering around simply do not compete on those terms. They are still out there. Nothing points at them.

Directories are the old answer to that problem, and they are quietly coming back. Should See This is one of the better ones: a browsable collection of interesting sites, sorted into categories, each with a short line explaining what it is and why it earned a spot.

The range is deliberately wide. Practical tools sit next to pointless generators. Data visualizations sit next to browser games. There are archives, live cams, simulations, single-purpose utilities, art projects, and the whole genre of website that exists purely because someone had an idea at two in the morning and knew how to write HTML.

What makes it work is that the curation is not neutral. An algorithm optimizes for a metric; a curator optimizes for whether something is worth your time. That produces a very different list, one that includes a beautifully made thing with forty monthly visitors and excludes a well-optimized page that would win any keyword contest.

The browsing experience is built for wandering rather than searching. Categories give you a direction, descriptions give you enough to decide, and clicking through costs nothing. It is closest in spirit to a good bookshop’s staff-recommendations table: a small filtered slice of an overwhelming thing, chosen by someone with taste.

If you have ever missed StumbleUpon, or found yourself refreshing a feed that gives you nothing, this is the correction.

What can you do on Should See This?

• Browse by category. Pick a mood, tools, games, weird, useful, and follow the list rather than a search query.
• Find genuinely useful utilities. Mixed in with the oddities are single-purpose tools that solve real problems and that you would never have found otherwise.
• Kill twenty minutes productively. The good kind of time-wasting: you come away having seen something, rather than having scrolled past four hundred things.
• Collect bookmarks worth keeping. A directory of this type tends to yield two or three permanent additions to your bookmark bar per visit.
• Rediscover the independent web. Personal sites, hobby projects and one-person tools that no ranking system will ever surface for you.
• Use it as a jumping-off point. Many listed sites link onward to their own favorites, and the trail keeps going.

Tips to get the most out of it

Open things in background tabs. The correct way to use a directory is to middle-click everything that sounds vaguely appealing and triage afterwards. Reading descriptions and deciding carefully wastes the whole point.

Go in without a goal. This is not a search engine and it rewards the opposite behavior. If you arrive needing a specific answer you will be disappointed; if you arrive curious you will do well.

Bookmark the ones that stick immediately. Directory finds evaporate. You will remember that you saw a great tool for something and have no recollection of its name three days later. Save it in the moment.

Check back periodically rather than constantly. Curated collections grow at human speed. Once a month is about right; once a day will show you the same list.

Follow the categories you would not normally pick. The strongest finds tend to come from the section you assumed was not for you, because you have no existing coverage of that space.

Submit the good ones you know. Directories run on contributions. If you have a favorite obscure site that nobody links to, sending it in costs you a minute and makes the collection better for everybody.

If you like Should See This, also try…

• The Useful Website: a similar curated stash, leaning harder toward practical tools.
• Kagi Small Web: a stream of posts from independent blogs and personal sites, no algorithm involved.
• Wiby: a search engine that only indexes simple, old-fashioned, hand-made pages.
• Cloudhiker: press a button and get dropped on an interesting site, the StumbleUpon approach.

More directories and doorways in Tools & Utilities, and the stranger destinations they lead to in Weird & Wonderful.