Ten years ago when someone wanted to put up a public internet profile, it would usually be on Geocities. Geocities had the potential to become something great like what Facebook is today but it was acquired by Yahoo and it pretty much end up being neglected for years.
Geocities was shutdown by Yahoo in October 2009. That was almost three years ago. One could safely say that Geocities is dead. All their pages are supposed to return 404 errors.
Apparently Geocities survives or atleast 97,100 URLs on Geocities are still active. Carry out a search “site:Geocities.com“ on Google and you will get thousands of results. None of these links seem to return “Page not Found 404” errors and the actual Geocities websites are still alive and kicking.
There seems to be no explanation on why these Geocities URLs are still alive. Interesting when I tried the same search on Bing Search, it returned no results.
It seems Google does a really through job of scouring the dark alleys of the internet. As someone who put up very amateurish personal profile online way back in year 2000 on Geocities, I was quite happy to find that some part of it still survives on the internet. 🙂
Do drop in your comments.
(via Hacker News)
One Comment
It is indeed very weird that going to geocities would give us messages like “Site closed” and still they are showing up the pages for profiles. Not even a block for search engine!