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Lycos, poster child of Internet boom, sells for just $36M
- mpk 16y agoConsidering I figured they'd died shortly after the bust, 36M doesn't sound that bad to me.
- sophacles 16y agoMy first thought was "Woah, Lycos was still around?".
- nopassrecover 16y agoYeah I'm not sure where the value is. The hope of converting traffic? I can name a dozen startups that would be better $36M investments.
- frossie 16y agoI'm not sure where the value is According to the OP they seem to think it's in the brand name, which is pretty bizarre - how much brand recognition can Lycos have? Last time I can remember using Lycos, something like only 1% of people were on the Internet, and at least some of us must have died since then :-)
- hugh3 16y agoIf they relaunched it I might use it for retro charm.
- kierank 16y agoThe way it looks now, you could easily mistake it for one of those spammy search pages: http://www.lycos.com/ http://www.lycos.com/
- jgilliam 16y agoLycos is a perfect example of an internet company that failed because it was run by sales people and not engineers. I was a software developer there in the late 90's, and we did some of the first eye-tracking studies on how people used the search engine. What we learned was shocking - no one looked at the flashy ads. The more we tried to make them stand out, the more they looked at the boring text in the middle of the page. Clearly, the solution was non-flashy ads. Except, that's not what advertisers wanted, and Lycos did whatever advertisers wanted. I'm sure Google did those same studies when they were working on their ads and saw the same thing. Since they were run by engineers, they made their ads text. The rest is history.
- jtbigwoo 16y agoI think the flashiness would not have mattered so much if Lycos's results had been better. If I recall, the search results I got from Lycos were poorer than WebCrawler or Alta Vista. There wasn't that much difference, though--every search engine's results were filled with spammy crap. Yahoo, Lycos, Excite etc. decided to attack the spam problem with brute force by creating human-edited portals. When Google appeared on my radar in late 1999/early 2000, it was a revelation. For the first time in many years, I could enter a search term and have a 75% chance of success compared to sub-50% rate of other search engines. The gap in effectiveness was too large for any other search engine to bridge. (This also sort-of explains why Bing will have a hard time unseating Google. Google has improved to about 95% accuracy for me. Even if Bing gets to 99.9% accuracy, I probably wouldn't notice the difference.)
- hga 16y agoHowever your point would seem to reinforce the parent's point: Lycos chose to attack the problem with $$$ ("brute force by creating human-edited portals"), not engineering (better search algorithms; maybe more properly called CS, but you get the idea).
- jgilliam 16y agoThe reason the results were lousy was due to the sales culture. Sales people needed more pages to put banner ads on, so all our efforts went to building a "portal" -- not to improving search. The last thing Lycos wanted was for people to find something somewhere else on the internet.
- SandB0x 16y agoAh, Lycos, Infoseek, AltaVista. I miss searching you all in separate Internet Explorer 4 windows on my Pentium MMX. Here in the distant future I can just speak to my handheld supercomputer and it shows me exactly what I want.
- maukdaddy 16y agoI always thought Hotbot was the best for geeks. I do miss AltaVista though.
- muhfuhkuh 16y agoIt was hotbot or webcrawler for me. And, yes, Altavista will always be remembered, especially for babelfish.
- Ravenlock 16y agoOh man - until you said that I had entirely forgotten that there were once programs that did nothing but query the menagerie of search engines out there and show you a page of results so you could pray that one of them was what you wanted and open them all in your separate web browser of choice. Not-so-good-old-days indeed.
- 16y ago
- nopassrecover 16y agoIt's telling that the kind of job Lycos is offering is an Associate to Senior Level Software Engineer in Web Publishing, and that trying to apply for this position (their "corporate culture" swayed me...) takes me to a Recruit Wizard.
- henrikschroder 16y agoAt least they did better than Lycos Europe which liquidated last year.
- elblanco 16y agoWow, I had no idea Daum was the owner. Daum is huge in S. Korea.
- snorkel 16y agoThis is why Lycos was able to survive on life support for so long. Seems Daum thought they were buying a prestige brand in US after Lycos star was already dimmed. A classic example of a distant parent not understanding the local trends.
- coderdude 16y agoInteresting. I was going to post earlier that I had a hunch Lycos was big is S. Korea after the main character in "My Sassy Girl" (2001) is seen using Lycos for his email. I figured that since it was 2001 it might not be the case anymore, but maybe it still is big out there.
- elblanco 16y agoI have a feeling that must have been some kind of product placement. I've rarely seen anybody in Korea not on Daum or Naver.
- st3fan 16y ago"The quality of content and tools offered by Lycos has always attracted the best of the consumers across the world." Seriously? Like what?
- ShabbyDoo 16y agoSo, who profited in 1999 when Lycos was sold for $5+B? Some quick Googling didn't result in any answers.
- olegk 16y agoIt was sold for $12.5 billion (in stock) to Terra Networks (Telefonica) in May 2000 (Telefonica stock is worth more now than it used to in 2000) So it looks like Lycos investors made a brilliant move.
- 2mt_stephan 16y agoGive those "just" $36M to me. Thx.
- GavinB 16y agoWe all thought it was dead, but it's still ranked 194th by compete.com, with over 6 million uniques per month.
- snorkel 16y agoI visited their office recently. It is like visiting a living history museum of the dot-com boom. Their business plan called for more of the same served in classic web 1.0 style, and they seemed rather proud of it too.