And now, all those thousands and thousands of websites are no more, killed off by the capricious hands of evolving technology, time and Yahoo. Or are they all really gone for good?

Earlier this year, when Yahoo announced they’d be unplugging Geocities in the near future, Archive Team initiated the Geocities Project. The project started in April 2009, and ran full steam until yesterday. Its goal? To download as much of Geocities as possible before the lights were turned out. And that’s a pretty big task. Nobody knows for sure exactly how big Geocities was, but the Archive Team folks estimate it’s somewhere around 23 million webpages, representing approximately 10 Terabytes of data (about 10,000 GB). If you want to try to find your old website, you can give it a go at http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://put/your/url/here. So far the live archive is a few months behind though, so don’t be surprised if the site you’re looking for isn’t available yet.

One more way that a semblance of Geocities will survive, is through the Wayback Machine on the Internet Archive. For those not familiar with it, the Wayback Machine “captures” websites at various points in their history. You can find many old sites there, at various stages of their history, but it’s not an exhaustive record.

And if you’re still feeling nostalgic, but not nostalgic enough to actually go and wade through dozens of decade-old websites, then check out this Comedy Central article Goodbye Geocities: 7 Retro Things We’ll Miss Forever. Most of us may not shed a tear for the loss of those under construction banners, visitor counters and guestbooks, but it’s still comforting to know that someone is saving Geocities, the now-historical artifact of the evolution of the internet.

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