Indomitable filetype of the early web. Meme-vessel, page-spacer, action-graphic-maker — GIFS are a quintessential feature of the 1990’s web aesthetic, but remain just as popular today as they were twenty years ago. GeoCities, the first major web hosting platform for individual users to create their own pages, and once the third most visited site on the web before being shut down in 2009, occupies a similarly notable place in the history of the web.
So we combined these two aspects of web history buy sales lead by extracting every animated GIF from GeoCities in our web archive and built a search engine on top of them. Behold, for your viewing pleasure, over 4,500,000 animated GIFs (1,600,000 unique), searchable based on filename and URL path, with most GIFs linking to the archived GeoCities web page where it was originally displayed.
Soft-launched at our anniversary event on Wednesday, where we also projected GifCities on the side of our headquarters in San Francisco, the project has been featured in The Guardian, BoingBoing, the A.V. Club, CNET, and others. The GeoCities GIF collection was also made available for creative reuse by artists and researchers, and featured in work such as the GifCollider project currently showing at BAMPFA (see the videos online) and the Hall of GIFs data visualization at NCSU. Shout-outs also go to others working with the GeoCities web archive, including the Geocities Research Institute and historians. More details on the project can be found at the GifCities about page.
As a part of our 20th anniversary, here are some highlights about tools and projects, from the Internet Archive, helping to make the web a more reliable infrastructure for supporting our culture and commerce.