Feed: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics
Feed Link: https://www.engadget.com/
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Title: The Internet Archive modernizes its GeoCities GIF search engine

Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2025 19:23:15 +0000
Link: https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/the-in...

The Internet Archive made it easier to search for '90s-era GIFs. GifCities
contains millions of animations from the decade of flannel shirts and Soup
Nazis. The GIFs were pulled from old GeoCities webpages, which (mostly) bit
the dust in 2009.

The new version of GifCities is much easier to search. You can now search
semantically, based on the animation's content. In other words, it's much
more likely to bring up the topic or scene you're looking for by describing
it. In GifCities' old version, you could only search by file name. (If you're
feeling masochistic, you can still access that version under a "Special
search" tab.)

The updated GifCities also now uses pagination. That's a good thing, as the
old version's infinite scrolling could make for slow browsing. You can also
create and share "GifGrams." As the name suggests, these are custom e-
greetings made from those ancient GIFs.

Internet Archive

The Internet Archive launched GifCities in 2016 to celebrate its 20th
anniversary. If you're too young to know, GeoCities was the quintessential
early internet web-hosting service. A precursor to social media, it was full
of embarrassing fan pages, personal photo albums and "Under construction"
GIFs. (You'll find plenty of the latter in this search engine.) Yahoo pulled
the plug on most of GeoCities in 2009. (Disclosure: That's Engadget's parent
company.) However, the Japanese version survived for another decade.

If you're of a certain age, you'll likely enjoy browsing the archive. (Or,
learn what passed for internet humor before you were born!) Just note that
many results are NSFW. I made the mistake of searching for "Mr. T," and I
will now leave you to douse my eyes with bleach.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at
https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/the-in...
geocities-gif-search-engine-192315963.html?src=rss

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