Take heart: I checked this by taking a random screenshot, and browsing down to see how long it took me to find a commercial page. A quick sense of my trail was really encouraging:
- Open source wasm runtime
- Science transparency campaign
- Netherlands gov anti-climate change program
- open thesaurus
- GNOME conference
- France's portal of towns and cities
- Scientific measurement standardistion page
- Scientific journal
- free eBook library
- parked domain
- Linux community
- Open source graphics library
- placeholder/template blog
- A book publisher (selling books!)
It took quite a while to find a commercial site,and that itself (a bookseller) is a positive thing itself.
EDIT: I just realized, there are weird sites even on onemillionscreenshots.com. Type in obscure, older-style URLs via the search bar until you find one, then go to its screenshot. If you're lucky the surrounding sites will be more older-style and weird, less store pages.
I’m one of the makers of this - thank you for posting!
We built it in early 2024 and it’s due an update.
While the main visualisation is currently out of date we’ve been grabbing screenshots monthly for the last 18 months. There’s a a free (no key required) API to all the data at https://ScreenshotOf.com
I’d love to hear any ideas you have for improving it.
Thank you! This is exactly what I want to do with this. I have embeddings for all the images but hadn’t figured out the last step to getting them onto a grid like that. Can’t wait to try this.
This is a neat visualization. It makes me want to build something like this with actual screenshots (scraping from places like old forums, image hosting sites, etc.) rather than web page renderings.
One of my most prized possessions is my collection of personal screenshots -- I've managed to save basically every screenshot I've taken over the past ~20 years. It's very nostalgic to put them on shuffle and see how my desktop has changed over time, remember what random thing I was working on, etc.
Could be cool to extend the concept beyond one user.
I screenshot all new sites I visit. A UI interaction catches my attention, I screenshot.
My files system is 60% images. It's an habit.
As a self-taught software dev; it helped me hone good design skills and also off topic - I poke around a lot when I visit certain websites to see which technologies they are built with. Maybe it was me testing js scripts or verifying the API/Object properties of certain functions - the habit stuck haha.
Same here. It sounds like you even started when I did, ca. 2006. Starting from the blackberry era to my current pixel I've tried to do something similar with my cell phones, but I never usually program in that environment so I never got it off the ground. When LLMs got good a couple years ago getting a screenshot task up and running on my android was one of the first things I tried, but it's been a pain. Apparently Android has been putting in guards against that type of application for security/privacy reasons.
I have an Android, and use the free Tasker app to automatically take a screenshot of my active phone screen every 19 minutes. It takes only a few minutes to set up the Tasker script.
I have vague plans to do something with these one day. But until then, I hoard!
Did tasker do it for you? I tried about 10 yrs ago but with no success. I'll give it another go, thanks. I don't have any future plans for these but similar to OP I see them on a "pictures screensaver", sometimes on chromecast to a TV. I certainly regret not having done this in the 90s, particularly the BBS era, so that is justification enough for me to continue doing it.
This really makes clear how boring web design has become. 99% of websites use the same standard layout, there's almost nothing distinct or exciting about any of the designs. I remember web design being an art form, with books being printed with the best designs... I'd visit brand websites just to look at the design itself, even if I wasn't interested in what they were selling.
Of course not all is bad, but I'd love to see some creativity again, it seems like almost no one dares to break the norm anymore.
I like that we are stagnating. One of the things that took us away from the early content-focused days of the web is when every business had to get their brochures online, and every designer had to make their mark with how creative they could be. It vastly threw off the signal to noise ratio of web sites, and it delayed good UX for at least a decade because everyone re-invented menus and buttons on every web site.
Don't get me wrong. I like creativity. I am an artist, even have a degree in Fine Arts. But there are times to innovate, and there are times to just make things work. Web UX needs to just work.
The vast majority of buildings do follow the same regional templates though.
The reason they’re not specifically concrete cubes is more to do with the relative unpopularity of brutalist design than it is to do with the artistic flair of architects.
In fact I’m sure most architects would love to stamp more of their creative personality into their work but they have to dial it back for cost and practicality reasons.
I do wonder how HN specific this is? Every site that has a quirky design or attempts something new gets absolutely blasted by surly people. But then someone posts a funny GeoCities style bootstrap theme and everyone goes on about how they miss when sites had a quirky touch?
I’m so happy I was not the only person to notice that.
A bit quirky is exactly how I would have described it and once I accepted scrolling one direction would move the page wherever the designer wanted, I was fine.
I guess we found all the kids at Ender’s battle school that couldn’t imagine the enemy’s gate as “down”.
From the well aged book "Don't Make Me Think", people read the web differently than books. Almost always they are there to find information or get something accomplished, not for aesthetics or pleasure (though social media has likely skewed this since it's penning)
This is why consistent UX beats out cleaver design (churn)
Like if someone wants to do crazy stuff, that’s fine, do it as an art project, whatever.
But IMO the only people who benefit when businesses and institutions are required to turn their websites into works of art, are artists. Everyone else is worse off.
Wow, I‘m impressed. This is a really cool tool to get some inspiration as web dev. Although I have to say it‘s a bit scary how similar all the websites look nowadays…
Something is weird with some of the gray areas where it'll say "this screenshot appears broken", but I thought it was just my machine. Your image looks very similar in the the broken in the same pattern. So I guess it wasn't just my connection and caching issues.
Very cool. Would be interesting for a more niche filter criteria, since you aren't exactly finding many hidden gems in the top million mostly corporate sites. Maybe AI could provide that filter (top 1 million "niche" sites, or smaller sites that have been around since the late 90s).
Glad to see "dead internet theory" not holding up!
PS: As someone who worked on internet search, I can assure you that at least half of most popular web pages change in about 6 months time. And the change is in no way something that can be done by bots.
This is dead internet theory though. Instead of seeing personal websites we see its mostly business fronts. Internet has gone from a place where every can have their own space to a business catalog.
It would be interesting to analyze this dataset in terms of colors, layout, features, fonts, photos, etc. to be able to statistically measure the uniqueness or creativity of a given web design.
And it does it in an unusual way. After browsing around on the website and then noticing that the back button history is just the same site name repeated many times, I worried about my history needlessly polluted by this website. But when I opened my browser history, it was just a handful of URLs in there, each representing the screenshot I had actually clicked on.
So, yes, it does break the back button, but it doesn't pollute the actual history.
It is implemented using web maps technology (https://leafletjs.com/), similar to e.g. the Google Maps satellite view. The screenshots are then served pre-assembled into quadratic map tiles at different zoom levels. This way the client only ever has to load and display a hand ful of relevant tiles.
I assume that they are using some form of mipmapping, a technique by which you have several images at different sizes to represent different levels of detail. It is used a lot in 3D environments.
My younger bro makes music, my older bro (a dev like me) critiqued his new vocal track just this evening. I said it’s fire; he called it cliché. We exchanged looks, and my younger bro quipped, “Perspective is all it’s about.” We laughed.
This just makes me realize that entirety of the internet has just become a gateway to sell you something.
Take heart: I checked this by taking a random screenshot, and browsing down to see how long it took me to find a commercial page. A quick sense of my trail was really encouraging:
- Open source wasm runtime
- Science transparency campaign
- Netherlands gov anti-climate change program
- open thesaurus
- GNOME conference
- France's portal of towns and cities
- Scientific measurement standardistion page
- Scientific journal
- free eBook library
- parked domain
- Linux community
- Open source graphics library
- placeholder/template blog
- A book publisher (selling books!)
It took quite a while to find a commercial site,and that itself (a bookseller) is a positive thing itself.
It seems like the screenshots are clustered in some way. That is especially visible when you zoom out.
Someone could make: one million screenshots of indie homepages, e.g. from https://explore.marginalia.nu/view
EDIT: I just realized, there are weird sites even on onemillionscreenshots.com. Type in obscure, older-style URLs via the search bar until you find one, then go to its screenshot. If you're lucky the surrounding sites will be more older-style and weird, less store pages.
Example: https://onemillionscreenshots.com/?q=red-lang.org, https://onemillionscreenshots.com/?q=gunnerkrigg.com
It’s been a continual evolution of making everything commercialized.
We are living in an age that in the west it is super popular to monetise your body even. Late stage capitalism.
East ain't that much better :)
Hi HN,
I’m one of the makers of this - thank you for posting!
We built it in early 2024 and it’s due an update.
While the main visualisation is currently out of date we’ve been grabbing screenshots monthly for the last 18 months. There’s a a free (no key required) API to all the data at https://ScreenshotOf.com
I’d love to hear any ideas you have for improving it.
Very cool!
A long time ago I used to make mosaics of game-making competition screenshots https://williame.github.io/post/143376853353.html https://williame.github.io/post/127137593983.html
The algorithm for doing so is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_algorithm
It might be fun to offer some mosaic layouts as well as the embedding-based layouts?
You can embed the images and then organize them like this
https://ryancompton.net/2017/08/18/one-thousand-captcha-phot...
Thank you! This is exactly what I want to do with this. I have embeddings for all the images but hadn’t figured out the last step to getting them onto a grid like that. Can’t wait to try this.
This is a neat visualization. It makes me want to build something like this with actual screenshots (scraping from places like old forums, image hosting sites, etc.) rather than web page renderings.
One of my most prized possessions is my collection of personal screenshots -- I've managed to save basically every screenshot I've taken over the past ~20 years. It's very nostalgic to put them on shuffle and see how my desktop has changed over time, remember what random thing I was working on, etc.
Could be cool to extend the concept beyond one user.
I screenshot all new sites I visit. A UI interaction catches my attention, I screenshot. My files system is 60% images. It's an habit.
As a self-taught software dev; it helped me hone good design skills and also off topic - I poke around a lot when I visit certain websites to see which technologies they are built with. Maybe it was me testing js scripts or verifying the API/Object properties of certain functions - the habit stuck haha.
Dey well
Same here. It sounds like you even started when I did, ca. 2006. Starting from the blackberry era to my current pixel I've tried to do something similar with my cell phones, but I never usually program in that environment so I never got it off the ground. When LLMs got good a couple years ago getting a screenshot task up and running on my android was one of the first things I tried, but it's been a pain. Apparently Android has been putting in guards against that type of application for security/privacy reasons.
I have an Android, and use the free Tasker app to automatically take a screenshot of my active phone screen every 19 minutes. It takes only a few minutes to set up the Tasker script.
I have vague plans to do something with these one day. But until then, I hoard!
Did tasker do it for you? I tried about 10 yrs ago but with no success. I'll give it another go, thanks. I don't have any future plans for these but similar to OP I see them on a "pictures screensaver", sometimes on chromecast to a TV. I certainly regret not having done this in the 90s, particularly the BBS era, so that is justification enough for me to continue doing it.
The Tasker developers have spent a lot of effort making it easier to use. I used GPT-4o to advise me on mine. I'm sure any modern AI could handle it.
Please publish those screenshots somewhere, guys. They're a part of history, and we don't have enough of them.
just started my collection 3 years ago. it feels more nostalgic and personal than my phone's photo collection ;)
This really makes clear how boring web design has become. 99% of websites use the same standard layout, there's almost nothing distinct or exciting about any of the designs. I remember web design being an art form, with books being printed with the best designs... I'd visit brand websites just to look at the design itself, even if I wasn't interested in what they were selling.
Of course not all is bad, but I'd love to see some creativity again, it seems like almost no one dares to break the norm anymore.
I like that we are stagnating. One of the things that took us away from the early content-focused days of the web is when every business had to get their brochures online, and every designer had to make their mark with how creative they could be. It vastly threw off the signal to noise ratio of web sites, and it delayed good UX for at least a decade because everyone re-invented menus and buttons on every web site.
Don't get me wrong. I like creativity. I am an artist, even have a degree in Fine Arts. But there are times to innovate, and there are times to just make things work. Web UX needs to just work.
Yeah 90% of websites are just informative … why would they need to be creative ?
the same reason every building in the world is not the same identical concrete cube
The vast majority of buildings do follow the same regional templates though.
The reason they’re not specifically concrete cubes is more to do with the relative unpopularity of brutalist design than it is to do with the artistic flair of architects.
In fact I’m sure most architects would love to stamp more of their creative personality into their work but they have to dial it back for cost and practicality reasons.
There was some F1 website posted on here the other day and it was absolutely beautiful, but a bit quirky to use in practice.
Ton of people complained, they hated it!
That's why everything is fucking boring, because everybody tries to cater to the average.
I do wonder how HN specific this is? Every site that has a quirky design or attempts something new gets absolutely blasted by surly people. But then someone posts a funny GeoCities style bootstrap theme and everyone goes on about how they miss when sites had a quirky touch?
I’m so happy I was not the only person to notice that.
A bit quirky is exactly how I would have described it and once I accepted scrolling one direction would move the page wherever the designer wanted, I was fine.
I guess we found all the kids at Ender’s battle school that couldn’t imagine the enemy’s gate as “down”.
This, I assume: (vertical scrolling moves horizontally, then vertically, later diagonally)
https://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/43832710/how-f1...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44816977
I tried really hard to like that F1 website but just couldn't do it: terrible experience.
From the well aged book "Don't Make Me Think", people read the web differently than books. Almost always they are there to find information or get something accomplished, not for aesthetics or pleasure (though social media has likely skewed this since it's penning)
This is why consistent UX beats out cleaver design (churn)
Bring back those crazy flash websites from the early 2000s
Pls no.
Like if someone wants to do crazy stuff, that’s fine, do it as an art project, whatever.
But IMO the only people who benefit when businesses and institutions are required to turn their websites into works of art, are artists. Everyone else is worse off.
There were some absolutely amazing ones in the style of old demoscene releases
See also, The Tyranny of the Marginal User: https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-margi...
This gave me anxiety. First time I experience doom scrolling without scrolling nor even spending more than 1 minute on a page. Great work !
Rarely I save something like this. Addicting. Saved it in my daily news. It is interesting to get new ideas by just clicking on the zoom button.
Wow, I‘m impressed. This is a really cool tool to get some inspiration as web dev. Although I have to say it‘s a bit scary how similar all the websites look nowadays…
zoomed out image looks interesting
https://i.postimg.cc/SK0CMnPt/ss.png
Something is weird with some of the gray areas where it'll say "this screenshot appears broken", but I thought it was just my machine. Your image looks very similar in the the broken in the same pattern. So I guess it wasn't just my connection and caching issues.
Like a sonar sweep straight outta SSN-21 Seawolf
Barely related despite their names: Damn, http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com is 20 years old...
What a story: https://thehustle.co/million-dollar-homepage-alex-tew
Finding my app's website on this made me giggle :)
Cloudflare Family DNS seems to be blocking this site.
I saw at least one uncensored porn site in there.
Not much yellow on the web
Very cool. Would be interesting for a more niche filter criteria, since you aren't exactly finding many hidden gems in the top million mostly corporate sites. Maybe AI could provide that filter (top 1 million "niche" sites, or smaller sites that have been around since the late 90s).
Nice! Only suggestion would be to not snap the zoom (when using the keyboard) - but very cool!
Glad to see "dead internet theory" not holding up!
PS: As someone who worked on internet search, I can assure you that at least half of most popular web pages change in about 6 months time. And the change is in no way something that can be done by bots.
This is dead internet theory though. Instead of seeing personal websites we see its mostly business fronts.
A million websites is not even close to touching “the long tail”.
This is dead internet theory though. Instead of seeing personal websites we see its mostly business fronts. Internet has gone from a place where every can have their own space to a business catalog.
Mine is far from popular and hasn't changed at all in 21 years.
It would be interesting to analyze this dataset in terms of colors, layout, features, fonts, photos, etc. to be able to statistically measure the uniqueness or creativity of a given web design.
This site breaks the browser's back button.
And it does it in an unusual way. After browsing around on the website and then noticing that the back button history is just the same site name repeated many times, I worried about my history needlessly polluted by this website. But when I opened my browser history, it was just a handful of URLs in there, each representing the screenshot I had actually clicked on.
So, yes, it does break the back button, but it doesn't pollute the actual history.
Why is this so fast
It is implemented using web maps technology (https://leafletjs.com/), similar to e.g. the Google Maps satellite view. The screenshots are then served pre-assembled into quadratic map tiles at different zoom levels. This way the client only ever has to load and display a hand ful of relevant tiles.
It's pretty clever optimization, it actually only shows a few dozens images at all times and only update the groups as you zoom in, for example https://tiles.onemillionscreenshots.com/2024-05-01/tiles/-1/...
You don't even need something fancy like WebGPU/WebGL, just the CSS transition property will do the job there.
It's "just" Leaflet but that's how all map libraries work. Super easy to implement and it can be used for much more than just maps.
I assume that they are using some form of mipmapping, a technique by which you have several images at different sizes to represent different levels of detail. It is used a lot in 3D environments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mipmap
I asked them to add my site and got spammed with some service they offer.
Its as simple as your site not being one of the 1 million most trafficed
I like the ones that are greyed out because they have some infernal popup about to appear
Clicking on the website to view the details appears to be broken
Might have been a temporary glitch?
Just tried and it's working here in the US.
Cool. Thanks for including my website.
neat but not actually screenshots. Screenshots would show windows, menus, etc.....
Seems like a lot bootstrap like templat sites.
Not a lot melonking sites.
Sometimes simple UI gets the job done well enough.
Every website looks so similar in design to one another that it feels eerie
Fun fact: It would take ~278 hours to take a look at 1M websites for 1s each.
Meh... [big number] + [thing] meta seems overplayed by now
One of my art axioms: one thing is boring; one thousand of that thing is an installation
Someone might use this in a Ted Talk!
My younger bro makes music, my older bro (a dev like me) critiqued his new vocal track just this evening. I said it’s fire; he called it cliché. We exchanged looks, and my younger bro quipped, “Perspective is all it’s about.” We laughed.
As they say, One man’s trash…
Dey well
Critique is good. Only through BRUTAL critique can you polish perfection.
axioms of large numbers. steal one person's money, go to jail. steal a lot of people's money, you're a bank. or some such.