Yahoo’s free web page service, Geocities, will be closing it’s doors before the end of 2009. Many of you would read this and say, "Yeah, so? Geocities sucks. Good riddance." And you would be correct with that judgment.

However something that most people don’t realize is that Geocities in its present form serves an archive of how the internet used to be.

With a few search terms it’s easy to find web pages in there that are over 10 years old. I’ll instruct how to search Geocities in just a bit.

How many web sites do you know of that aren’t billed as archives (like Internet Archive) that have user created content in its original untouched form that old? Probably not too many. The only ones you could probably think of are forums. One I can cite as an example is the phpBB2 Forum Archive. The 2.0.x Support Forum has 1.4 million posts in it, spanning 5,726 pages and post dates go all the way back to 2001. That’s a lot of content.

But as for user created web page content sites with user content as old as Geocities, there aren’t too many.

A short history of why people used Geocities in the first place

Getting a web page of your own during the late 1990s was rather difficult.

If you wanted your own dot-com/net/org, this usually cost you at least $30 yearly for registrar fees, not including web hosting costs on top of that. For most people that was way too expensive considering they already spent at least $20 monthly or more for dial-up internet access alone. In addition to that, it took as long as two weeks for a newly registered domain to propagate itself thru the internet so people could actually load it (whereas in modern day it usually takes less than 24 hours).

People wanted something free that could be activated instantly with little fuss. The two largest contenders of the day were Angelfire (which also still exists) and Geocities. Geocities was the better of the two. It was easier to use and didn’t have as many restrictions as to what you could put on there. It also loaded faster compared to the competition.

Geocities was also an early innovator in the respect they had a somewhat decent in-browser WYSIWYG HTML editor. So in case you didn’t know HyperText Markup Language, you could still make your pages.

You can consider Geocities the MySpace/Facebook of the late 1990s. Everybody had one and it was "cool" to have.

What made Geocities suck?

There were several things about the Geocities service that made it horrible.

First, you couldn’t connect it to anything. Each account was an island unto itself in the way that Yahoo controlled it. Prior to Yahoo’s acquisition there were "neighborhoods" of web pages, and could be considered  a very early version of social networking – but Yahoo stopped using that. That was a mistake.

It was such a mistake that it make the title of the service meaningless. The "cities" part was originally to indicate groups of users in said neighborhoods of the system. Yahoo completely killed that off, taking away all community aspect of the site.

Second, even though it was less restrictive compared to its competition, Geocities still had too many rules, and this bothered users to no end.

Third, it was static. You had to manually link pages and know how to do it. This proved to be very irritating in short order; it took a long time to update your own pages.

The thrill of having your own web page lost its luster quickly with the above three factors combined; it’s why most people abandoned Geocities altogether.

Is Geocities worth saving?

As a service, no, it’s not worth saving. The service does nothing but put a hole in Yahoo’s wallet and nobody uses it anymore.

But as an archive, yes it is. It’s a huge archive of people’s opinions, thoughts and quite a bit of instructional and historical documentation.

How to search Geocities for stuff

Using the site Google operator, go to Google and search like this:

site:geocities.com [search term here]

Example 1: site:geocities.com linux

Example 2: site:geocities.com ti-99

Example 3: site:geocities.com radio shack

Example 4: site:geocities.com "windows 95"

Example 5: site:geocities.com ASCII art

I’m betting you’ll find some useful information once you conduct a few searches. Or maybe just some interesting stuff. Who knows?

How to save Geocities web pages (or any web page for that matter)

You may have your own Geocities page(s) you want to archive for yourself. Or maybe archive some others.

There are three easy ways you can do it.

1. File / Save As – All modern web browsers have this function, however it separates out the images which can be a pain to deal with.
2. PDF Creator – Creates a virtual printer driver in Windows for making PDF files. When you "print" from the web browser, it creates a PDF of the web page you’re currently viewing. Works great and usually keeps all the formatting in check.
3. ScreenGrab for Firefox – An addon that has the ability to "save complete page" which includes what you see and also all the stuff when you scroll down as one image. Much easier than ALT+PrintScreen. Saves as PNG or JPEG images. I suggest setting it to JPEG so the files aren’t so huge (especially for really long web pages).

Why saving old internet stuff matters

Geocities has stuff that goes back beyond ten years (some stuff as old as 13), and there are opinions, information and otherwise you will find on that site and nowhere else. It is worth your time to spend at least a few minutes to see if there’s anything in there you want to archive, because once it’s gone it’s probably never coming back.

And yes, most of the content is total crap, but that’s how user generated internet content works. Geocities was the crap back then. Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and YouTube is the crap of today. And we’ll have more crap in the future to be sure.

But our crap makes up the internet as a whole – and it should be archived.

Like what you read?

If so, please join over 28,000 people who receive our exclusive weekly newsletter and computer tips, and get FREE COPIES of 5 eBooks we created, as our gift to you for subscribing. Just enter your name and email below: