Relive the Horrors of the Early Internet with the Geocities Archive Project
geocitiesarchive.org
geocitiesarchive.org
Geocities was a free web hosting service that was launched in November of 1994. On a corporate whim, in 2009, Yahoo! shut down Geocities, which meant years of digital data was lost to the world. This equated to around 38 million user-created webpages, rich with family photos, fledgling business profiles, and pics that were sure to embarrass their creators many years on.
So what happened? Geocities was acquired by Yahoo in January 1999 for $3.57 billion in Yahoo stock. Unfortunately, the new terms and conditions introduced by Yahoo! proved less than popular with the vast majority of users: Yahoo! stated that it now owned all content within Geocities. After trying to provide a more premium service by offering vanity urls, rumours began to surface during 2001 that Geocities would be closing. Yahoo! would go on to effectively destroy fifteen years of early internet history overnight as many users did not have the ability to make a copy of their website before it was taken offline.
On April 23, 2009, Geocities stopped allowing any new member registrations and announced that the United States version of Geocities would be shutting down on 26th of October 2009.
Good news! So, with some tricky coding, and driven by the belief that this early internet history should not be lost on future generations, we have searched, indexed and made available for search over 40 million user created files.
We hope you're ready for an entertaining and nostalgic walk down memory lane.
The team @ Geocities Archive