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All the hamsters of GifCities. Photograph: Internet Archive

If you're nostalgic for a certain time on the internet – a time before your Facebooks and your Twitters, when the only live video was grainy webcam links that updated one frame a minute and your favourite social network was that one forum you'd been on since 1995 – you could do worse than spend a few minutes today on the Internet Archive's latest project, GifCities.

Under construction. Photograph: Internet Archive

The search engine is the best manifestation yet of the non-profit's mission to archive and catalogue the history of the net. It's a spin-off from the group's archive of GeoCities, an early web-hosting service that was launched in 1994 and let anyone make their own sites. At one point, the Internet Archive says, it was the third-most visited site on the web.

A hamster

GeoCities was acquired by Yahoo in 1999, and at its peak hosted over 38m pages, but in 2009, Yahoo announced they would close the site, "at which point the Internet Archive attempted to archive as much of the content as possible".

My little pony. Photograph: Internet Archive

Those pages are still hosted, largely in their original form, by the group, but GifCities takes the whole thing a step further, pulling out the best part of late-90s internet: the gif.

A skull. Photograph: Internet Archive

"Mining this collection, we extracted over 4,500,000 animated gifs (1,600,000 unique images) and then used the filenames and directory path text to build a best-effort "full text" search engine. Each gif also links back to the original GeoCities page on which it was embedded (and some of these pages are even more awesome than the gifs)," says the Internet Archive.

The group has already highlighted some of the best uses of the archive: "The Internet Archive's own Jason Scott has highlighted "Under Construction" GeoCities gifs, librarians at North Carolina State University had been interested in GeoCities gifs for use in their data visualisation lab, and researchers such as Ian Milligan had been datamining the full GeoCities web archive to explore community formation."

Source: Internet Archive hosts all the gifs of 90s web giant GeoCities