In celebration of its 20th anniversary of archiving the web, the Internet Archive has released GifCities. It’s an animated GIF search engine that has indexed millions of animated GIFs from the obsolete GeoCities websites.
Geocities was an early web hosting service, started in 1994 and acquired by Yahoo in 1999, with which users could create their own custom websites. The platform hosted over 38 million user-built pages and was at one time the third most visited site on the web. In 2009, Yahoo announced it was closing down the service, at which point the Internet Archive attempted to archive as much of the content as possible.
Mining this collection, we extracted over 4,500,000 animated GIFs (1,600,000 unique images) and then used the filenames and directory path text to build a best-effort “full text†search engine. Each GIF also links back to the original Geocities page on which it was embedded (and some of these pages are even more awesome than the GIFs).
Head over there to relive a classic era of the World Wide Web. And please, go notify all your readers that your site is still under construction.
Hi, my name is Mark and I have spent the last few months working on a new Geocities Archive project (https://www.geocitiesarchive.org).
We feel that it is important that this content remains online for future generations as it is a vital piece of early Internet history.
Unlike other archive sites, we have been methodically going through all the old pages and indexing their content; i.e We do not rely on Google to provide the indexing of the site. We have also recently started tagging old Geocities images with their relevant keywords for further indexing.