I held a séance for 31 dead websites. The most honest ghost said "that never made it into my HTML."

Description and use

Closet‑404 lets users resurrect 31 dead websites, displaying their archived HTML, comments, images, and AI‑generated eulogies, plus coroner reports from live searches.

Problem

How to recover and present the content and history of dead websites using archived HTML and AI-generated eulogies.

Outcome

31 dead sites are now accessible as interactive cases with authentic archived content, AI‑generated eulogies, and searchable coroner reports, all for free.

Workflow

• Collect Wayback snapshots for each site
• Extract HTML comments, images, generator tags, and page text
• Store extracted data
• Use Gemma 4 to generate eulogies from stored HTML
• Run SerpApi searches for each domain to build coroner reports
• Build 3D closet UI to display cases
• Implement search, resurrect, and remembrance features

Evidence

The Wayback Machine last captured that page in 2001.

Source

The model that said it is Gemma 4, an open‑weight model, and it is only allowed to remember what survived in the HTML.

Source

A coroner runs a live web search (SerpApi) for each domain, and Gemma summarises only those results, with [n] citations.

Source