If you are reading this, then there's a high chance you remember the "era" when Yahoo and Geocities were both uber cool. How things have changed. But sometimes, they stay the same. After all, GIF has made an unmistakable comeback. And the iGeneration is lapping it up.
In the spirit of the nostalgia, The Internet Archive has created a special search engine for the gobs of GIFs that once graced Geocities. The once-famed web hosting site took away our entire afternoons. And it played host to a lot of GIFs.
Gifcities is the special search engine that will help you comb through more than 4.5 million classic animated GIFs (1.6 million unique images). Click on each GIF and go to the original Geocities page where it was hosted.
The search engine brings back the old-fashioned look with the flashy colors and the blinking Search button. All for the sake of taking us back to the time when just the sound of dial-up internet could bring out a smile.
The internet Archive explains the thought behind the project:
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.
If you are too young to remember, Geocities was a popular web hosting service for creating personal websites quickly. It was launched in 1994 and acquired by Yahoo in 1999. With 38 million user-built pages, it was at one time the third most visited site on the web. In 2009, Yahoo announced it was closing the service. The Internet Archive attempted to archive as much of the content as possible.
Go Back in Time and Have Fun!
Clicking some of them can take you to some good finds. Try a search with "Star Wars".
The Internet Archive is a lot like that old pawn shop for memorabilia hunters. And as we have seen, you can find a lot of digital artifacts there. Take a trip down memory lane and tell us about your favorite finds.
Image Credit: Michael R Ross via Shutterstock