A pixel-art museum room at night: beige computers on wooden desks, a 33.6 modem on a plinth, framed home pages on the walls and visitors looking round.

A time of beeps and bloops, guestbooks and glitter GIFs. Explore the websites, tools, and trends that defined the early web, when patience was a virtue and every page felt like a personal creation.

  • NEW!

    BackRub: Google before it was Google

    Google was first called BackRub, a 1996 Stanford project named after the back links it counted. How a dorm-room search engine became Google.

  • NEW!

    Webrings: how we found websites before Google

    A webring linked fan sites in a loop: Previous, Next, Random. How a 1994 experiment became a teenager's business, fell to Yahoo, and came back.

  • NEW!

    What happened to Ask Jeeves?

    Ask Jeeves lost its butler in 2006, and Ask.com closed on 1 May 2026. How the web's politest search engine rose, faded and said goodbye.

  • NEW!

    What happened to GeoCities?

    GeoCities closed on 26 October 2009, a decade after Yahoo paid $3.57bn for it. How the web's first great neighbourhood rose, faded and was rescued.

From the museum

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