Geocities started in 1990’s and the service for hosting websites for free and paid packages was owned by Yahoo! in January 1999 and now, after providing the service continuously for more than 10 years, they are finally going to shut it down today, on Monday 26th of October 2009.
Geocities hosted around thirty million (30,900,000) public web pages and almost eight million (8,150,000) images according to google search results. All these pages and images will be shut down today, as geocities will be shut down today by Yahoo! removing all the information and webpages hosted there. This number is of those sites which were listed in Google only. This could be much higher because many of the Geocities site were private and there fore google and other search engines don’t know about them and don’t index them in the search results.
When Yahoo! will start removing all the pages hosted on Geocities today from the internet, it will start making many hundred million links to get broken and many images from the google image search to be invalid too . . .
In my initial days of webdevelopment, i got my hands on Geocities. Although never had any professional site to run on geocities ever, but it was really a part in my development, and have some memories associated with it!
We will miss Geocities! specially when we will see some broken link leading to geocities . . . Lets see how long does it takes for google and other search engines to remove all the geocities pages from their search listing.