By: Tim Nash

While having lunch with a couple of Yahoo employees on their awesome Sunnyvale campus the discussion turned to Geocities demise. Earlier in the year myself and TheHodge interviewed Yahoo founder David Filo Founder after they announced the closure of Geocities during that interview David expressed a hope that it would be archived either by Yahoo or a third party when Yahoo closed it down. With the announcement of the final closure I was surprised they never announced this archive.

Hours prior to to Geocities closure, Reocities was born a project to archive its content, it got a lot of twitter time including myself and they manage to scrape a hefty chunk. However unknown to them Yahoo had been working to save Geocities through archive.org

For legal reasons Yahoo felt they could not wholesale dump Geocities content to archive.org but did provide the site with every assistance to allow them to store and and access all publicly available sites at time of closure, they also allowed their bots unlimited connections and bandwidth to grab as much content as possible.

Why didn't they publicise it?

Good question, but they were quite keen when I asked that the message was made clear they had worked with archive.org and that this was a long term plan, as David said back in June. With archive.org not being indexed however it does mean a large part of the web has still vanished from day to day searches and so potentially their still is a place for projects like reocities.com.