I thought it was taken down by "the feds", I assume it's being run by some government agency under direction of media rights holders now? These sites seem to survive for some time playing whackamole, but AFAICT law enforcement got all the long running big sites.
It's curious that, again from what I can tell, such sites often get taken over (not the actual sites but copycat domains that Google serve) as copycats in order to serve malware. But somehow that's preferable (for the government agencies) to hosting inert torrent links.
They got taken down again a few days after that, although they've occasionally been back up since. I don't think of them as a big site, although I could be wrong.
Yeah, I think they sold out to some private equity firm that tore it down, but I guess finds it profitable to repost stuff. I think it sold for $30M so I’m sure the current owners would give it up for pretty cheap.
I wonder who uses it. Maybe it’s just a google seo farm or something (although I’ve never seen it in my results).
They're still out there, albeit harder to find. Geocities dying was quite a blow and Tripod is scarcely touched these days. Squatters, I fear, are moving to NeoCities, but here and there I find some sites that are diamonds in the rough. Individually hosted sites are rarer still.
I tend to browse forums (barely have the time these days) where these links are shared. Once in a while Google will get these pages or you might see a Wiki page created for them, but for the most part, they're really spread through manual sharing.
Those sites still existed last I checked, which was a few years ago. Once in a while I get nostalgic for something I grabbed on one of those sites around 2005, I'll run a search for it and find three new blogs posting pirate links to an eclectic mix of music they consider cool.
I remember reading that Google did something to derank them, so they may finally be dead, but they continued on for a long time past when I visited them daily for hipster cred.
That's a blast from the past. I remember that page generating buzz and filling up with ads.
Go there now and click on some of them. Seems 80% of them are parked domains now, and the rest have been transferred to businesses that may or may not resemble the original one.
I didn't look into it very much back then. They were giving free hosting and subdomains back when such a thing was expensive and jumped on it for my homepage. Somehow I saw the Google cache of my page and it was surrounded by ads.
So they were serving different content to different clients based on user agent and/or IP block.
When I found out I deleted my account.
I see the site still exists, they might do the same thing. It's 3x on the .ro TLD.
As I understand it, it's gone. They possess no archive, except for what was backed up by web archivers. I could be mistaken.
I spent years trying to acquire what remains of Geocities, which is the domain itself, geocities.com. I got closer than you would expect, but was told it was being "used internally" so they couldn't divest of it. I was also told I wasn't the first person that inquired.
As I understand it, geocities.com will go to Verizon (unless that falls apart), who will do god knows what with it. Right now it redirects to Aabaco Small Business, which I think is a spinoff that's not part of the deal. Aabaco curiously has an office in Beaverton, OR, a suburb of Portland, where I live. I've been meaning to drop by their office randomly with a jello mold or something and say hi.
I really want to relaunch geocities.com. I'd love it if someone gave me the domain so I could do that, but I'm not holding my breath.
I remember altavista.digital.com from back when people thought subdomains were really going to matter - but eventually they went away and Google took over.
Ha! The current owners still have altavista.digital.com - it has some history thing.
I would compare this to atdhe.net. They were a fairly large site that linked to streamed sports and TV shows until their domain was seized by ICE because it was a .Net domain. But they managed to stay alive, change their domain name, and get back in business as some other website (I believe it's now atdhenet.tv).
The point is that they were still able to get back their audience after losing their primary domain name.
It's curious that, again from what I can tell, such sites often get taken over (not the actual sites but copycat domains that Google serve) as copycats in order to serve malware. But somehow that's preferable (for the government agencies) to hosting inert torrent links.
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