GifCities!

October 26, 2016 9:56 PM

To celebrate "20 years of preserving the web", the Internet Archive has unveiled GifCities – The Geocities Animated GIF Search Engine.

To date, the project contains 4,500,000 animated GIFs (1,600,000 unique images). So wave your flag high, ignore any "Under Construction" signs, don't forget to play with the cats and dogs, and happy searching!

posted by zarq (19 comments total)

Forgot to add: Some image results may be NSFW.
posted by zarq at 9:59 PM on October 26, 2016

I feel like I just took a hit of some grade-A, primo nostalgia.
posted by gloriouslyincandescent at 10:03 PM on October 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

Neat! By the way, you get some depressingly predictable results if you type in 'Hillary'. Everything old is new again!
posted by Atom Eyes at 10:10 PM on October 26, 2016

All of the flames bring me back. I wish I could just browse the gifs by category instead of searching.
posted by systematize at 10:24 PM on October 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

All the bad antialiasing is a big LSD retro trip for me.

We were memers when memers were uncool.
posted by rokusan at 10:37 PM on October 26, 2016

I didn't know I needed this.
posted by prismatic7 at 1:22 AM on October 27, 2016 [3 favorites]

I just fell down the Buffy fansite memory hole thanks to searching 'Buffy' and scrolling through the resulting gifs. BtVS fansites were what got me going on the internet so a lot of what came up was So Familar.

brb, listening to Sarah Mclachlan's "Surfacing" at my desk.
posted by halcyonday at 5:44 AM on October 27, 2016

Slayer Dave's Metal 'Zine (© 2005(!) All Rights Reserved). I appreciate his restrained use of a static "Under Construction" image.
posted by obscurator at 7:01 AM on October 27, 2016

I was looking for "webring" and found this amazing site which rivals Slayer Dave. It has roughly the same number of useless animations, but adds unnecessary umlauts but almost no pesky content getting in your way.

I really liked webrings in those days between many sites popping up on the web every day and decent search engines and indexes came along. When I looked at the first few animated GIFs I was immediately reminded of finding a webring navigator under all of those under construction banners and flames.
posted by Clinging to the Wreckage at 7:25 AM on October 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

Went in looking for dancing hamsters, was not let down.
posted by grumpybear69 at 7:50 AM on October 27, 2016

Search for "nsfw" - you'll never believe what happens next!
posted by lagomorphius at 8:13 AM on October 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

Metafilter?
posted by SteveInMaine at 8:34 AM on October 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

I see what they did there.
posted by SteveInMaine at 8:35 AM on October 27, 2016

SteveInMaine: Metafilter?

That apparently is the "query not found" gif.
posted by AzraelBrown at 9:36 AM on October 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

The number of "under construction" GIFs is disappointing.
posted by montag2k at 11:10 AM on October 27, 2016

Well, it's still under construction.
posted by zarq at 1:16 PM on October 27, 2016

I'm just gonna make the search result for skull my homepage.
posted by straight at 3:58 PM on October 27, 2016

This is so awesome. How else would I ever have been able to find this
posted by milnak at 7:54 PM on October 27, 2016

Linux Penguin meets Max Headroom and gets stuck on repeat
posted by not_on_display at 8:31 PM on October 31, 2016 [1 favorite]