GeoCities
GeoCities, later Yahoo! GeoCities, was a web hosting service that allowed users to create and publish websites for free and to browse user-created websites by their theme or interest, active from 1994 to 2009. GeoCities was started in November 1994 by David Bohnett and John Rezner, and was named Beverly Hills Internet briefly before being renamed GeoCities. On January 28, 1999, it was acquired by Yahoo!, at which time it was reportedly the third-most visited website on the World Wide Web.
Logo under Yahoo! from 2009 to 2019 | |
Type of site | Web hosting service |
|---|---|
| Owner |
|
| Created by | David Bohnett and John Rezner |
| Commercial | Yes |
| Registration | Yes |
| Launched | November 1994 |
| Current status | Inactive since 2009 (Japanese version inactive since 2019) |
In its original form, site users selected a "city" in which to list the hyperlinks to their Web pages. The "cities" were named after real cities or regions according to their content: For example, computer-related sites were placed in "SiliconValley" and those dealing with entertainment were assigned to "Hollywood", hence the name of the site. Soon after its acquisition by Yahoo!, this practice was abandoned in favor of using the Yahoo! member names in the URLs.
In April 2009, the company announced that it would end the United States GeoCities service on October 26, 2009.
There were at least 38 million pages displayed by GeoCities before it was terminated, most user-written. The GeoCities Japan version of the service endured until March 31, 2019.