The Web Archive modernizes its GeoCities GIF search engine

The Web Archive made it simpler to seek for ’90s-era GIFs. GifCities comprises thousands and thousands of animations from the last decade of flannel shirts and Soup Nazis. The GIFs had been pulled from outdated GeoCities webpages, which (principally) bit the mud in 2009.

The brand new model of GifCities is far simpler to go looking. Now you can search semantically, based mostly on the animation’s content material. In different phrases, it is more likely to convey up the subject or scene you are on the lookout for by describing it. In GifCities’ outdated model, you may solely search by file identify. (In the event you’re feeling masochistic, you’ll be able to nonetheless entry that model underneath a “Particular search” tab.)

The up to date GifCities additionally now makes use of pagination. That is a superb factor, because the outdated model’s infinite scrolling might make for sluggish shopping. You can too create and share “GifGrams.” Because the identify suggests, these are customized e-greetings constructed from these historic GIFs.

The Web Archive launched GifCities in 2016 to rejoice its twentieth anniversary. In the event you’re too younger to know, GeoCities was the quintessential early web web-hosting service. A precursor to social media, it was filled with embarrassing fan pages, private photograph albums and “Below building” GIFs. (You may discover loads of the latter on this search engine.) Yahoo pulled the plug on most of GeoCities in 2009. (Disclosure: That is Engadget’s mum or dad firm.) Nevertheless, the Japanese model survived for another decade.

In the event you’re of a sure age, you may seemingly take pleasure in browsing the archive. (Or, study what handed for web humor earlier than you had been born!) Simply be aware that many outcomes are NSFW. I made the error of looking for “Mr. T,” and I’ll now go away you to douse my eyes with bleach.