GifCities: The GeoCities Animated Gif Search Engine was a special project of the Internet Archive originally done as part of our 20th Anniversary in 2016 to highlight and celebrate fun aspects of the amazing history of the web as represented in the Wayback Machine. See the original blog post announcement. In 2025, we released an updated version of Gifcities that included improved search, some interface improvements, and the ability to make and send GifGrams.

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. For the Gifcities project, we used the Internet Archive’s GeoCities Closing Crawl. You can read more about the archiving of GeoCities at https://archive.org/web/geocities.php.

Mining the Internet Archive’s GeoCities Closing Crawl collection, we extracted over 4,500,000 animated GIFs. In the original GifCities, we used the words in the filenames and directory path text to build a best-effort “full text” search engine. In the 2025 update of GifCities, we used AI tools to create a semantic-based search index to supplement the original search index to improve discoverability. Each GIF in the search results also links back to the original GeoCities page on which it was embedded (and some of these pages are even more awesome than the GIFs themselves).

Thanks for the project go first and foremost to the millions of everyday citizens that built such incredible pages and GIFs in GeoCities. We also owe special thanks to Yahoo for their guidance and open communication about the GeoCities closure. We also thank the independent volunteer team of archivers at Archive Team for their efforts helping to preserve GeoCities. Thanks go as well to the efforts of the tireless Internet Archive staff that work to preserve the web for both today’s users, for posterity, and for animated GIF enthusiasts worldwide.

The current version of GifCities was created by Nate Smith, Paul Baclace, Alex Dempsey, and Jefferson Bailey. The original GifCities was created by Vinay Goel, Richard Caceres, and Jefferson Bailey. Send inquiries, props, rants, and any questions to gifcities@archive.org.

Now go look at some awesome early web GIFs!