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Saturday 31 October 2009

Farewell then, GeoCities

So GeoCities is no more.

When I first got access to the web (around 1995), you used to bump into GeoCities sites all over the place. I would look at my web browser (good old Netscape), and wonder what to go looking for. "How about my favourite bands?" And at the other side of the web there was some adolescent setting up their GeoCities web site, wondering what to put onto their home page. "How about a list of my all my CDs? Yes, that will be interesting." In the days before Google and relevant web searches, Lycos or Alta Vista would happily bring up such sites in response to a query for Genesis or Pink Floyd.

Web sites like that are now either long gone, or on page 945 of my Google results and so, effectively, equally non-existent. Lycos is still around (much to my surprise--what market share can they have?), but nowadays puts the Pink Floyd official web site at the top of its search results.