The Internet Archive is a treasure! It cares about the longevity of the web. It cares about history. It cares about GIFs.

“GIFs, seriously?” asks a person I just made up who underestimates the value of a GIF.

Yes, “GIFs, seriously.” I reply to that made-up-person.

They released a search engine for animated GIFs a few weeks ago: gifcities dot org.

A search for “dancing baby” rightly brings up many results and variations. That moving image is famous enough to have a wikipedia entry.

The About Page for the site explains that it’s a search archive of Geocities. It also describes the fact that in initial versions of the site they inferred the contents of the images using filenames and file paths. They also used discriminative (as opposed to the odious generative AI tools) to enhance the search results.

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).

My first website was on GeoCities. Mine was at SoHo ~ 3384 It’s in the Internet Archive but it’s live, on this site, at /archive/1. I tuned the 1996-era HTML to have modern HTML and CSS. My website ought to be a living representation even if lots of it is out of date. I seldom delete things. URLs should live forever.

I have a large amount of uploaded images on this site and on Flickr. I have toyed with the idea that I ought to use AI-based tooling to spider those images for meaning. I am certain I have gems in there that deserve reappraisal or reuse into my creative projects. Some who have read my work or heard me talk may hear an incongruity in considering AI usage. It is a nuance of AIs that they can be used to extract value, as Internet Archive did for GifCities. I direct you to Léonie Watson‘s talk at FFConf 2024: AI and Accessibility: the Good, the Bad, and the Bollocks. It’s a must watch.

It was a delight to explore GifCities. I kept putting in nouns and seeing the results.

Flashing images. Silly 3-D animation. Pixelation galore. 88×31 images. Such wild raucous creativity. Eventually I put in the word “pizza:”

I was delighted to see an image that I had made!

It’s also in the header for my Guestbook.

That is one of the first animated GIFs I made myself. It was featured on my Newcomer? page. That was on my Earthlink website. Also archived here. A “tilde site.”

The link in GifCities goes to a page in tribute to a Kevin Pomeroy. That’s a different “neighborhood” from GeoCities: WestHollywood ~ Stonewall ~ 2952. It has a graphical subheading of “October 1960 to January 1975.” I suppose Kevin must’ve liked pizza before something happened. It’s not clear what, but despite the dancing pizzas it seems ominous.

There are other related pages on the site. The site belongs to Norman. Norm liked AbFab, the band Erasure, lived in Baltimore and San Francisco, and once ran into OJ Simpson on the street. It’s the kind of website too few people make these days. I find it charming.

There’s enough details on Norm’s site that I could probably track down more information about what has happened since the late 1990s for Norm, but for now I am content to read the time capsule and appreciate that somebody read my page on earthlink.net, liked my silly GIF, saved it, and incorporated it into their website for Kevin.

I don’t have an overall message here other than my usual one: Make web pages. Share web pages.

GIFs, seriously.

What will you find on GifCities.org?

One addendum is that my longtime internet pal Dennis Wilen worked at Geocities when it was under the aegis of Yahoo. Dennis gave a tour to a few folks in the L.A. area for his mailing list Web405. It was amazing. I wish I had taken photos because it was an impressive place. I remember in particular banks of monitors showing off the neighborhoods and servers and how they were working.