The Internet Archive has launched GifCities, an animated GIF search engine that has indexed over 4,500,000 animated GIFs saved from the defunct GeoCities.
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. More information on Geocities can be found on the related Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_GeoCities. For the Gifcities project, we used the Internet Archive’s Geocities Closing Crawl (https://archive.org/details/geocities&tab=about). More about the project is at https://archive.org/web/geocities.php.
