When it comes to choosing a homepage for our web browsers, we all have different preferences. Some people prefer a blank start page, some may want to see thumbnails of most frequently visited sites (like in Chrome) while others may be more happy seeing their favorite website (like news.yahoo.com) set as their browser’s homepage.

There’s another option as well – a random homepage. You may use any one of the following URLs as your browser’s homepage and expect to see something new and unexpected each time you open your browser.

1. Flickr Photos - This will load a random set of most interesting pictures from Flickr, the photo sharing website.

2. Wikipedia - This will open some random article from the Wikipedia Encyclopedia - replace “en” in the URL to see articles in your own language - de for Deutsch, es for Español, it for Italiano and so on.

3. Delicious - This will open a web page that has recently gone popular on Delicious, the social bookmarking website. You can also tweak the delicious URL to load web pages related to your own interests. For instance, delicious.com/popular/cricket?random=1 will only show cricket related websites in the start page.

4. Dictionary - Learn the meaning of some new English word every time you load the browser. Available for most other popular languages as well including Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, Persian (Farsi), etc.

5. Words – This is again like the Wiktionary page mentioned above except that it will display a new word and its meaning from the popular “A Word a Day” website.

6. StumbleUpon - This will open a random website that is popular among members of the StumbleUpon community.

7. Reddit – See a random story, photo or video that may have hit the Reddit homepage.

8. Reader Play – Browse interesting stuff that’s getting lot of likes on Google Reader.

Just drag any of these URLs to the browser’s home icon and prepare yourself to see something unexpected each time you launch your web browser.

This story was initially published in 2009 and this is an updated version.