GIFs galore: New search engine for rescued GIFs
The information superhighway is in danger of being clogged up again with small moving images of modest information content. The Internet Archive is to blame.
My eyes!
(Image: Screenshot)
Just what we needed: the return of animated GIFs from Geocities. A new search engine from the Internet Archive is digging through this pile of rubble. It is unashamedly called GifCities and unearths little moving images that once flashed on Geocities webpages. GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) is a bitmap file format for images published in 1987, which can also be animated since 1989.
Actually, we would have preferred to keep quiet about it. And the Internet Archive's first attempt at a GIF search engine was only a modest success. GifCities.org, which was launched in 2016, did allow searches, but the comparison was limited to file names.
The new edition is comparatively diabolical: it allows semantic searches. GifCities finds GIFs according to the content displayed, not just the file name. According to the Internet Archive, this is made possible by a large language model called CLIP-ViT L/14. Incidentally, it is still possible to search by file name.
In addition, the search results at GifCities can be filtered according to the size of the images to be found. As if that wasn't enough, each image found is provided with a hyperlink that leads to an archived copy of the former Geocities webpage. This makes it easy for nostalgics to waste many hours of their lives browsing through Geocities relics.
GifGram: Personal messages with GIFs
Those who prefer to feast their eyes on randomly selected Geocities relics will be served by researchers Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied. Their blog One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age shows a screenshot of a former Geocities webpage every 20 minutes.
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The Internet Archive even goes one better: GifCities can also be used to create so-called GifGrams. These are messages to third parties that the sender can "embellish" with GIFs rescued from the Geocities stock. Viewer discretion is advised.
GeoCities was once the largest provider of personal hosting. From 1995, users could create homepages there free of charge. The web addresses were made up of neighborhoods, street names and house numbers, just like a city. In 1999, in the middle of the dotcom bubble, Yahoo took over the service for a billion dollars. Ten years later, Yahoo took the wrecking ball and shut down Geocities in 2009. Only in Japan did the service continue to run for another decade.
(ds)
