Gifcities brings back 1.6 million old-school GIFs from the GeoCities era

When I was 12, I spent an entire year learning HTML so I could build my own websites and create the ultimate repository of jokes on the internet. In my quest to learn as many cool developer tricks as possible, I ended up filling a site with loads of widgets and animations, but totally skipped building a joke library. As a result, Humor Unlimited ended up being, well, rather limited.

I was reminded of my failure when I stumbled upon GifCities, a new project from the folks behind the Internet Archive. It’s a search engine that lets you rifle through 1.6 million unique GIFs that were hosted on GeoCities sites, and it’s the most delightful site a 90s kid could spend a weekend on.

For those of you who are too young to remember, GeoCities was a Web hosting service that was launched in 1994 and acquired by Yahoo five years later. It was home to more than 38 million sites. The service was shut down in 2009.

The Internet Archive began archiving GeoCities’ content when it was set to down its shutters, and it’s extracted 4.5 million animated GIFs – of which 1.6 million are unique images. And to celebrate its 20th anniversary, it put together a full-text search engine so you can find classic GIFs from the 90s and early 00s for just about any situation.

Here are a few of my favorites:

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There’s a lot more where that came from, and you can get your nostalgia fix by entering keywords that were hot at the time; try some from this list that Google published in 2001 to get started. And don’t forget to share your favorite finds in the comments.