The 10 Best Unknown Websites

Sure we're all familiar with Wikipedia, Digg, and Bored.com. These popular websites serve as a diversion from everyday boredom by providing entertaining/interesting content. However, are the best websites the ones that are the most popular? After some extensive research, ten lesser known websites were found that rival (and even beat) some of the most popular sites on the web. Here is a list of the ten best unknown (based on Alexa rank) websites.


10. Inked Mag - This website isn't for everyone (which is why it is ranked #10), but if you are a tattoo fan, InkedMag.com is paradise. You can literally sort through thousands of the most kick ass tattoo pictures, join contests, read tattoo-related news, among other things.

9. JuicyCampus - Targeted towards college students, JuicyCampus allows students to gossip about other people or their campus while remaining anonymous. This is HIGHLY addictive if you still go to college and even if you are a recent graduate. One of the more unique unknowns that currently exist.

8. Newsvine - Newsvine is a great website to not only find the top news stories, but to also write about them. This website allows users to seed articles from various sources on the web and also create their own article. You can even earn a nice chunk of money if you have a popular column.

7. Metacritic - Once I discovered this website, I never went back to RottenTomatoes.com ever again. Metacritic has a similar concept as RottenTomatoes.com. They compile a bunch of reviews from various websites and come up with an overall average score. However, they not only do this for movies (new and old), but they have thousands of music albums, games, and TV shows. I like their scoring system a lot better than RottenTomatoes.com as well.

6. Candystand - This qualifies as the most popular of the "unknown websites". Candystand has hundreds of free games ranging from sports, puzzles, arcade, and more. Some might be turned off by the "in your face" candy sponsorships that take place, but it is easy to get over that minor turn off once you realize how great most of these games are.

5. Plime - Plime can be viewed as the Digg of offbeat news. Users are allowed to submit an "offbeat" story to a variety of categories and have other users vote them up or down. Your Plime score continues to rise as you submit more content. The benefit of this, is that the higher your Plime score is, the more likely you will end up on the homepage of Plime. I particularly like this website because of the lack of "shouting" that takes place (unlike Digg) and because of how interesting the stories are.

4. AnswersTV - Ever since the rise of YouTube, videos have been increasing in popularity on the Internet. AnswersTV has a wide selection of informational videos ranging from health, food, magic (you can actually learn magic trick secrets), and much more. These videos are updated frequently so you can always learn something new. I dare you to go on this website stay there any shorter than an hour.

3. SpliceToday - SpliceToday.com is a news websites that has articles on music, politics, pop culture, etc. Reading a SpliceToday.com article is the equivalent of reading a cross between a current news event and a short story. You really won't find journalism like this anywhere else. The writing is intellectual, humerous, thought provoking, and very entertaining.

2. QualityHealth - People might view QualityHealth as "WebMD" knock off, but in fact it offers a lot more entertainment value than it's rival website. QualityHealth allows you to find information on every type of disease imaginable, offers discounts on useful products, has a symptom checker (much like WebMD), and has one of the most interesting article selection on the web. Only on QualityHealth (at least to my knowledge) can you go from reading about breast cancer to finding an article entitled "10 Fattest States in America".

1. Finding Dulcinea – Finding Dulcinea encompasses all the positive characteristics of the best types of websites. It is entertaining, human-powered, informative, and current. Finding Dulcinea is the only website, to my knowledge, that provides extensive information on a variety of topics (much like Wikipedia) while offering top news stories. Best of all, this information is gathered by actual humans, not a robot. I can literally stay on this website for hours on end and find hundreds of entertaining pages.