GeoCities

GeoCities, later Yahoo! GeoCities, was a web hosting service that allowed users to create and publish websites free of charge, 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. 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. At least 38 million pages, most written by users, were displayed by GeoCities before it was terminated. The GeoCities Japan version of the service lasted until March 31, 2019.