A Visual Tour of Now-Defunct Websites That Once Ruled the Internet

Kaudo

Some websites once felt like the center of everything online. They had millions of users, loyal communities, and global reach. And then they disappeared.

Thanks to the Wayback Machine, many of these now-defunct websites can still be explored. We can scroll through their designs, read their front pages, and understand what they once were - and what they left behind.

Here’s a look at some of the biggest lost web giants and how you can revisit them.

GeoCities – The DIY Internet

GeoCities wasn’t just a website host. It was an entire world of homemade pages, organized by virtual neighborhoods. From 1994 to 2009, people built personal homepages full of GIFs, music players, and animated counters.

To explore old GeoCities content:

Search for specific subdomains like geocities.com/Heartland/, geocities.com/SiliconValley/, etc.
Use the Smartial Wayback Scanner to list all archived subpages of a particular URL
Expect broken images, but lots of preserved text and layout

GeoCities is often a starting point for those interested in building web museum exhibits.

MySpace – Music, Custom Pages, and Chaos

Before Facebook took over, MySpace was the go-to place for social networking. It allowed full page customization, music embeds, blog posts, and photo galleries. At its peak, it had over 100 million users.

Archived versions show:

User profiles with glittery backgrounds (and kitties!)
Artist pages with music autoplay
Personal blogs with surprisingly raw writing

Start with myspace.com/ in archive.org and choose years between 2005 and 2008. Due to the platform's structure, some user content may be inaccessible, but public artist and promo pages are often intact.

Ask Jeeves – Search with Personality

Ask Jeeves was one of the earliest major search engines, launched in 1996. What made it unique was its human tone - you could type full questions like “How do I change a car tire?” and get relevant results.

Archived snapshots let you revisit:

Its butler mascot, Jeeves
Early web design focused on helpful answers
The transition from Ask Jeeves to just Ask.com

If you're curious how search pages evolved visually, this complements our deep dive into how tech brands evolved.

LiveJournal – The Early Social Blog

LiveJournal was a mix of personal blog, social network, and community hub. It gave users space to post journals and connect through shared interests. It was especially popular among writers, artists, and fandoms.

Using the Wayback Machine, you can:

Visit user profiles, journals, and communities
Read entries dating back to the early 2000s
See how layouts and privacy settings changed over time

Search for URLs like livejournal.com/users/username or community.livejournal.com/.

Netscape.com – A Web Portal in Transition

Netscape’s role in browser history is well known, but many forget it also ran a major homepage for news, tech, and curated content. The site existed long after the browser faded, becoming a sort of proto-RSS hub.

Between 2000 and 2007, it featured:

Newsfeeds curated by editors
Tech coverage and commentary
Links to AOL content and early web videos

Snapshots from archive.org show how the tone shifted from innovation to aggregation, then eventually silence.

Xanga, Friendster, Orkut – All The Lost Social Layers

These three platforms built early social identities online. Xanga was part blog, part profile. Friendster was the something ike proto-Facebook. Orkut thrived mainly in Brazil and India.

While not all of their content is fully archived, you can still:

Explore login pages, user themes, and navigation
Trace how interface design changed between 2003 and 2007
Compare to later players like Facebook and Twitter

You’ll notice how much more customizable and expressive these older platforms were - something we touch on when exploring the 1999 web experience.

Screenshot and Save While You Can

Many snapshots are incomplete. Files disappear. Domains expire. If you discover an old favorite:

Screenshot the layout
Use Save Page Now on archive.org to refresh the capture
Extract the visible text using the Smartial Text Extractor
Document what year it came from

These efforts help preserve what little remains of sites that once defined how we shared, expressed, and connected online.

The websites that once ruled the internet may be gone, but they’re not entirely lost. With the Wayback Machine and the right tools, we can still walk through their digital halls and remember how the web used to feel, messier, more personal, and endlessly creative.