
Geocities Archive - geocities
https://www.geocitiesarchive.org/search.aspx?qry=guitar&checked=image
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codesushi42
Anyone remember when Geocities was a virtual city with neighborhoods?

I remember having to click around a visualization of a neighborhood block, and
having to reserve a homepage. Homepages were limited per neighborhood. Each
neighborhood had a name that was part of the URL path to the page.

That was very early in Geocities' life, and the artificial scarcity they tried
to create didn't last long. But that's the story behind the name "Geocities".

~~~
filmgirlcw
I do! I was in the “Pines” neighborhood of Silicon Valley! I signed up for my
first site in 1996 when I was 13.

I was a teen “community leader” for GeoCities from 1997 - 1999 (from the ages
of 14-16), which basically meant I was unpaid tech support who would answer
help emails about using GeoCitied and html and going through blocks in my
neighborhood to make sure websites didn’t violate the various community
guidelines. In exchange I got more space and a custom domain. The problem is
my custom username meant my site was never backed up in the GeoCities archived
because when Yahoo moved to usernames, there were issues preserving/indexing
sole of the old ones. The Wayback Machine has some of the site but not all of
it or the images.

I got some free GeoCities stock that became Yahoo stock that became worth $400
a share that my mom wouldn’t let me sell (I was 15 or 16 and it was an etrade
custodial account), something that 20 years later I still bitch at my mom
about (it was the only time she ever interjected in the managing of my
finances).

After Yahoo bought GeoCities, they sent out this survey for the CLs to fill
out, asking about community and some product things and thoughts on how they
could integrate with Yahoo. I sent some detailed response and was asked to get
on a conference call to talk more in-depth. The call went really well and they
offered to fly me out to Sunnyvale to discuss more in person/maybe look at a
job or some consulting. I was obviously excited, thinking they knew I was a
teen CL — I was thinking it would be a cool internship or summer job. When
they found out I was 16, the conversation ended and looking back, I get the
impression they were embarrassed to be taking feedback from a teenager (today,
company’s actively seek that out).

The teen program was ended shortly after — I suppose someone realized it
probably wasn’t legal to have minors policing content. The whole CL program
was shut down not long after after someone sued Yahoo for employing unpaid
labor.

I will always love GeoCities — it was my Introduction not just to building for
the web but to online communities in general.

~~~
fouc
I'm confused, did yahoo stock value peak before you turned 18 years old or
something?

~~~
filmgirlcw
Yes. I was 16 or 17 when it was at its peak, thus unable to sell without my
mom’s permission. The e-trade account was a custodial account; the shares
belonged to me but the account was controlled by my mom. When I did sell years
later it was for $45 or something a share.

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giancarlostoro
Sadly whatever my old website was, it was not popular enough to make any
archives. I feel like it was my first name, or some combination of my first
and last name.

~~~
sp332
Is it possible you went with "giancarlo" instead of "giancarlos"? I don't mean
to be silly but I see 232 files with giancarlo and only 1 with giancarlos.

~~~
giancarlostoro
No, Giancarlos is my first name and I have never used Giancarlo. Thats a good
question nonetheless!

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burlesona
Just browsing around I stumbled onto this awesome page:
[https://www.geocitiesarchive.org/arclc/h/u/humehwy31/aug1.ht...](https://www.geocitiesarchive.org/arclc/h/u/humehwy31/aug1.html)

This is someone doing an early form of blogging, chronicling a road trip all
across Australia, with a bunch of photos. I love how simple the website is,
and how the author took time to explain what links were and what you should do
to navigate through the posts.

That's the kind of stuff that was so neat to explore back in the day. What a
trip down memory lane!

~~~
Lucadg
I was looking for my travel diary of Australia I wrote on Geocities in 2000
and didn't find it. Then I saw your comment and it made my day:)

Also didn't find my Praguecheapflats geocities site which was basically a
precursor of Airbnb from 2001 and allowed me to travel the world full time for
10 years.

Geocities was really amazing for me, a non technical guy who just wanted to
put stuff online.

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anthony_doan
I'm surprise Angelfire and Tripod is still up. One of my first website was on
Xoom sadly they went away.

Geocities had a lot of fanfictions and I would go around the webrings to jump
to different fanfic websites. Those were good times.

I also remembered I had to use ftp to upload pictures onto those free hosting
website.

~~~
omnibrain
At one point Tripod also lost a lot of sites in an incident. I know because my
first homepage was among them...

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sosuke
Woah this was a Geocities website?! Chrono Cross fan pages.
[https://www.geocitiesarchive.org/arclc/z/u/zulwarn1705//home...](https://www.geocitiesarchive.org/arclc/z/u/zulwarn1705//home.html#)

~~~
cr0sh
Wow - that's actually quite polished for a geocities site and time period...

~~~
CM30
There were quite a few sites with that level of polish on free hosting
services at the time. Usually by people who either didn't have the means to
pay for hosting/a domain name or simply didn't see the need to at that time.
Came across quite a few of them when I used AOL's free hosting back in the
early 90s, or Tripod/Angelfire/whatever.

~~~
giancarlostoro
Tripod allowed me to make some good sites back then.

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amatecha
Weak, doesn't seem to have my sites which are indexed on archive.org :\

~~~
geocities
There's not going to be everything unfortunately. What was your site on
archive.org?

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jaclaz
Nice!

As a side note, there is also:
[https://www.oocities.org/](https://www.oocities.org/)

And for some times (now dead) there was Reocities.com, some of which has been
itself largely archived on the Wayback Machine:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20180308165314/http://www.reocit...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180308165314/http://www.reocities.com/neighborhoods)

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lain
Is the source of this the ~900GB torrent, or is there another Geocities
backup?

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geocities
Hi, the source was the torrent which we needed to patch up with other sources

~~~
lain
Cool, other sources? I'd like to help preserve them if you could pass on any
links.

~~~
geocities
You could try the archiveteams downloads

[https://archive.org/download/2009-archiveteam-geocities-
part...](https://archive.org/download/2009-archiveteam-geocities-part1/)

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cryptoz
In 1998-1999 or so, starwars.com and Homestead teamed up to make the
fan.starwars.com/ wysisyg fan websites. I loved mine and it's been gone for
~20 years, with seemingly no chance at all of an archive. Hardly anyone seems
to remember these in the first place, star wars fans and nerds included. Maybe
some day.

~~~
geocities
It's insane how all the early internet has effectively been destroyed with
absolutely no recourse of ever getting any of it back :(

~~~
stebann
I feel the same that you describe. I was a kid in early 2000's and many things
I used to access were not preserved in anyway. I'm so sad about it. That's why
I mirror the sites nowadays. The problem is that sites are bigger now are
harder to spider sometimes.

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sv123
I wish I could remember what my old geocities username was.

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StavrosK
Such a shame so many Web 1.0 websites went away. You can click "random
username" and get a feel for what the Old Web was like. Props to this project
for rescuing this many sites, although I'm kind of sad they couldn't get them
all...

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geocities
The Geocities Archive Project is slowly tagging old Geocities images using AI.

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realshowbiz
Is this really necessary? Wouldn’t compiling a complete archive be a good
first step?

~~~
geocities
We are trying to archive and patch together as much as possible given the
sources.

I don't think there is a full complete archive available anymore :(

Thanks for the feedback :)

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app4soft
Just tried _Geocities Archive_ — it can't find archive of _Makoto_ 's page[0]
with amazing addons for free _YSFlight_ simulator[1] ;(

[0]
[http://www.geocities.jp/room_makoto/main/ysfs/](http://www.geocities.jp/room_makoto/main/ysfs/)

[1] [https://ysflight.org/download](https://ysflight.org/download)

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codesushi42
My old website is not here because I used Tripod.

But _it was worth it_.

~~~
krapp
Tripod is still around. I still have an account there from 2001, but
unfortunately nothing is hosted there now but a default landing page.

It still has a cgi-bin, but I have no idea if perl scripts will run in it.

And surprisingly enough, Angelfire still exists. I just learned they're both
sharing a database being run by Lycos because I tried to recover an old
Angelfire account and it complained that my new password was the same as my
Tripod account.

~~~
codesushi42
Tripod had more storage and offered cgi bin when Geocities had none, IIRC.

~~~
krapp
I can't remember if I actually got a forum from Matt's Script Archive running
on Tripod, but I do remember writing by own horrible text-based forum that no
one else used.

Now it looks like you have to pay for FTP. Sad.

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zimbatm
Today's equivalent is [https://neocities.org/](https://neocities.org/) . Free
5MB account to upload your raw HTML&CSS.

If you feel nostalgic, have a look at
[https://districts.neocities.org/](https://districts.neocities.org/)

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roadbeats
My website is also not here unfortunately...

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echelon
This is awesome and brings back so many memories! Thanks a ton for doing this.

What methodology did you use to construct this backup?

As an aside, is there any chance whatever remnant of Yahoo still exists might
have disks lying around from the Geocities days that weren't formatted? Do you
think we could go about getting them?

~~~
geocities
The sites are from the torrent and also from the archive team as well. I had
to write some code that went through all sites and update the links. I also at
the same time tried to just extract the html body and use that for
indexing.... Yahoo! must still have the original sites. Surely they could just
put them online as a "Read Only" version. They would have nothing to lose

~~~
echelon
> Yahoo! must still have the original sites.

Are you sure? It cost money to maintain hardware and infrastructure.

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sp332
One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age has been blogging about individual pages and
trends across Geocities pages.
[https://blog.geocities.institute/](https://blog.geocities.institute/)

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kylek
Oblig- the Internet Archive’s gif search engine, GifCities:

[https://gifcities.org/](https://gifcities.org/)

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grepthisab
I'm getting runtime errors when searching, internal errors I as a user
shouldn't be able to see outside of some sort of debug mode. FYI

~~~
geocities
Yeah, our little project is getting quite a few hits at the moment - I may
have to upgrade the hosting lol. Sorry for the inconvenience. I didn't really
think anyone was that interested in Geocities anymore :D

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pwython
I feel like oocities.org has way more archived (except my Final Fantasy page
from 1998).

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tjr225
I wonder how many of us got our start editing html on
geocities/angelfire/tripod to create yet another Final Fantasy fan site...

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geocities
I did, notepad and Netscape was where it was at..

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fortran77
Malwarebytes is blocking that site.

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geocities
Hi, yes, I think this is because a few of the old Geocities sites had zip
files which allowed you to open CD trays and other "kewl hacks" back in the
day.

We have run malwarebytes over all the files and they are coming up clean.

[https://www.virustotal.com/gui/url/713c45d3ac7560847f48cc107...](https://www.virustotal.com/gui/url/713c45d3ac7560847f48cc1078b5c92d11f6b0d92d560e4a450471f344e4eb7f/detection)

~~~
fortran77
Yeah! I clicked through anyway. It seems safe.

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broabprobe
there are many geocities backups but I have yet to see a backup of the
hotbot.com pages

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pbhjpbhj
Reocities disappeared?

