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Internet Archive has made it easier to find GIFs from the ’90s. GifCities has millions of animations from a decade of flannel shirt and Soup Nazis. The GIFs came from old GeoCities pages, which (mostly), died in 2009.
Searching in the new version of GifCities has been made much easier. You can now search based on the content of an animation. It’s more likely that you’ll find the topic or scene by describing it. In GifCities old version, searching was only possible by file name. If you want to be masochistic, the old version is still available under “Special search” in the tab.
GifCities’ updated version now also uses pagination. This is a good thing as the old version had infinite scrolling, which could slow down browsing. You can also create “GifGrams.” These are custom eGreetings made from these ancient GIFs.
In 2016, the Internet Archive launched GifCities to celebrate its 20th Anniversary. GeoCities, if you’re not old enough to remember it, was the first web hosting service. It was a precursor to social media and full of embarrassing fanpages, personal photo albums, and “Under construction” GIFs. You’ll find a lot of these in this search engine. Yahoo shut down most of GeoCities’ services in 2009. (Disclosure: This is the parent company of Engadget.) The Japanese version, however, survived for another decade.
You’ll probably enjoy browsing the archives[if you’re a certain age]. (Or, see what internet humor was like before you were even born!) Please note that some of the results are NSFW. I searched for “Mr. T,” by mistake and now I’m going to leave you to wash my eyes with bleach.
