GIFCITIES

GifCities: The GeoCities Animated Gif Search Engine was a special project of the Internet Archive done as part of our 20th Anniversary to highlight and celebrate fun aspects of the amazing history of the web as represented in the web archive and the Wayback Machine.

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.

The Internet Archive GifCities project team: Vinay Goel (Senior Data Engineer), Jefferson Bailey (Director, Web Archiving), and Richard Caceres (Senior Software Engineer).GifCities is part of Archive Lab. Send inquiries, props, rants, and any questions to [email protected].Now go look at some awesome early web GIFs!