Technology · 2
When Yahoo acquired GeoCities in 1999 for approximately $3.57 billion, what happened to the platform's roughly 38 million user homepages when Yahoo shut it down a decade later?
Answer
They were permanently deleted
Yahoo shut down GeoCities in 2009 and permanently deleted its content, destroying tens of millions of user-created pages. The Internet Archive's volunteer project partially preserved some pages, but the official shutdown wiped the vast majority of GeoCities' content from existence.
💡 Did you know?
GeoCities divided the web into themed neighborhoods (SiliconValley, Broadway, etc.), making 38 million user homepages feel like a digital city before Yahoo deleted it all in 2009.
Other options people guess
- They were archived by Yahoo and remain searchable
- They were transferred to the Internet Archive automatically
- They were migrated to Yahoo's own homepage builder
Topics
- geocities
- yahoo
- 1990s
- web-history
- internet
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