For at least several months now, my browser has been unable to access Geocities websites. Every time I try, I get a “Internet Explorer was not able to open this website” error message. For a long time, I figured that Geocities must have gone down. But then I became confused since so many Geocities websites keep coming up as Google search results, so I tried to access a one on my friend’s computer, and hey! It works! So what’s going on? I attempted to look up the problem on Google, but I couldn’t find anything. I’m using Windows XP Professional, completely updated (I think). Is anybody else having this problem? How did this start?
Probably because Google search results are stored for sometime on their computer. I notice it with other websites too.
Sorry, I should have been more explicit in my original post. It doesn’t just happen with Google. When I try to access Geocities websites through posters’ links on this board, I get the same problem. Regardless of how I try to get to it, I get the same message. If I go to just plain old www.geocities.com, I get a whitepages search engine site (which annoyingly always maximizes my browser window). I can go to geocities.yahoo.com/ps/info1, but no member pages. It’s really bizarre.
When I go to www.geocities.com , I get their homepage, geocities.yahoo.com . Sounds like your browser has been hijacked somehow. Exactly what is the search engine page that comes up?
The standard advice around here is to try Spybot and/or Adaware. I don’t know if that’ll work, but they’re free and worth a try.
For the member pages you can’t access, what is their second level domain? In other words, are they on geocities.com or yahoo.com? Because if you are only having trouble acessing those sites on geocities.com (like member pages and the geocities version) the problem may be in your hosts file. This file acts like a mini DNS system just for your computer, allowing you to specify what domains are linked with what IP addresses (What is the Hosts File?). Look in *C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc* for the hosts file, and open it in notepad (make a backup first!). Check to see if it has anything listed for geocities.com, and if there’s anything suspicious, try commenting it out (place a pound (#) symbol in front of the line) and see if that fixes the problem.