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Trivia Website YMMV main index Narrative
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![]() Launcher of a Thousand GIFs Once upon a time in 1994, entrepreneurs David Bohnett and John Rezner founded a Web hosting service called Beverly Hills Internet, which would later be known as GeoCities. The service allowed anybody to create their own Web page for free, and each of those pages was sorted into a specific "neighborhood" depending on what its content was (CapitolHill for politics, MotorCity for cars, etc.). Through the rest of The Nineties, GeoCities grew to become of the biggest Web sites of its day, was the third-most visited Web site on the entire World Wide Web behind AOL and Yahoo, and had thousands of users signing up every day.Things started to go downhill the moment the site was acquired by Yahoo in January 1999. After paying $3 billion for it, Yahoo constantly struggled to make the service profitable, many users left over the new Terms of Service Yahoo put out, and the neighborhood categorization was dropped in favor of sites named after the users who made them. Given how huge a presence GeoCities had on the Internet at that point, Yahoo's mismanagement probably helped usher in the bursting of the dot-com bubble.Then in late June 2009, Yahoo announced that it would shut down the GeoCities service and every site in it, and on October 26, 2009, they followed through on that promise. Any attempt to go to a GeoCities page now will take you to a 404 page. Most people dismissed this happening with casual indifference, but then, soon after the closure was announced, a number of different archive projects sprouted up in an attempt to save and preserve as many of the more than 38 million pages that existed as possible, culminating in a 900 GB torrentThis website provided examples of:
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