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Lycos is still around and its search is pretty good
- ccvannorman 7y agoJust did a cursory search on Lycos, and the top 5 "results" were all ads, the first one being a super-ad with six (!) sub-headings.
- ccvannorman 7y agoIt also seems like Lycos does not default to https. Oh, Lycos. At least you're trying!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- gdm85 7y ago> After any Sponsored Links, the Web Results section shows information that comes from LookSmart or AllTheWeb. From https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2004/03/15/how-lycos-works/ https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2004/03/15/how-lycos-works...
- burlesona 7y agoOh man, Tripod and Angelfire too? I’m back in the 90’s for a minute.
- 52-6F-62 7y agoHaha. Guess who I’ve seen around Toronto on “tech swag” backpacks? https://www.tucows.com/ https://www.tucows.com/
- netsharc 7y agoThey don't offer software downloads any more? I browsed Tucows a lot, looking for cool new software..
- 52-6F-62 7y agoSame! It looks like they’ve completely junked their old content and pivoted hard.
- whatsmyusername 7y agoNow they're just a domain registrar for the alt right.
- wolco 7y agoFor the alt right, that sounds oddly selective? Do you have a source?
- chipotle_coyote 7y ago
- matsemann 7y agoHad to check. Lycos/tripod is still hosting a stupid website me and some friends made a bit after 2000 (2004?). The cost is probably none (some static files), but I'm impressed they haven't just removed it or lost it during all these years. Stagnant and probably no visitors other than us the weekend we made it. Edit: the glory: http://moj24.tripod.com/ http://moj24.tripod.com/ animated background, marquee and right-click blocking script in case someone tried stealing our content
- tomphoolery 7y agoAhh, bringing me back! I moved my site between GeoCities, Tripod, and AngelFire all the time back in the day...
- fishtacos 7y agoAww man, I had a Simpsons fan site up in the 1997/1998 time frame that Tripod eventually took offline due to some sort of abuse or something... which I never figured out. There were a lot of Simpsons fan sites up back then, as I recall.
- ftvy 7y agoAt that time, FOX was egregious about copyright claim to anything. They worked to take anything offline that was not official, hence licensed. I remember going to fan sites back then. One day they'd be up; the next, they'd 404. Not sure if much has changed.
- germinalphrase 7y agoThose are some high quality motion graphics on the car page, my friend.
- oldpmfan 7y agoWell, same here. An old fan page, last updated 2003. Amazing that it is still up: http://augbunny.tripod.com http://augbunny.tripod.com even the gallery still works http://augbunny.tripod.com/Gallery.htm http://augbunny.tripod.com/Gallery.htm
- 7y ago
- foota 7y agoTheir ads aren't even good lmao. Searching for test brings up the following ad: Test Test Test Test - Right Now www.kensaq.com/Test Test Test Test/Here Welcome to Kensaq.com. Find Test Test Test Test Today!
- reaperducer 7y agoTo be fair, a few weeks ago I searched for "fighter jets" on either Google or Duck and got ads for "Find discount fighter jets in your area!"
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- foota 7y agoDid you buy one? :-)
- wila 7y agoIt just means somebody paid for those keywords. When you buy your ad space at Microsoft, you can determine how it shows up at duck-duck-go, which keywords triggers your ad, what region you want it to work etcetera... (and yes, that is not a typo, you go to microsoft to buy ad space for ddg)
- casion 7y agoI just searched the exact title of an article... and the result wasn't on the first page. So... I tried it a few more times and I didn't get a single hit for any thing I tried. Google picked up each one with "I'm feeling lucky". DDG got them all too. I wouldn't describe this as "pretty good", or even "good" or even "worth the time I spent this last 90 seconds".
- anoncake 7y agoDid you put the title in quotes?
- casion 7y agoI didn't do that on any of the services.
- zepto 7y agoThen you didn’t use lycos correctly.
- unnouinceput 7y agoThe Apple mentality...I love it </sarcasm>
- anoncake 7y agoRequiring the user to know how to use a tool in exchange for making it more useful is decidedly not the Apple mentality.
- smt88 7y ago> I just searched the exact title of an article... and the result wasn't on the first page. This happens to me on Google a lot. I guess mileage varies.
- ChuckMcM 7y agoJust for grins, try the same search on Bing and on Yandex. Look at the first 20 'organic' results (not always easy I know but its worth trying to figure out). Search indexes have a reasonably unique fingerprint in the rank order of organic results for a given query. The ads and sponsored content are all over the map and perturbed by a/b tests and other things but the organic results typically come straight from the ranking algorithm. Most "Search portals" (which is the web page that you type at to get your search engine result page from (SERP)) are either using one of the two English language indexes (Bing and Google) with their own ad network, or "blended" index where the search portal might index somethings like Wikipedia and Stack Overflow and then use Bing or Google for the long tail stuff. The reason for this is economics, you can stand up a search portal on an AWS instance, feed all the queries to Bing out the back and sell ads on it and make a few bucks. In contrast building your own index requires many more servers, crawling over the content you want to index (if you want to keep it fresh) and generally much larger network and storage costs. So its harder to pay for that with third party ad networks (not impossible, just harder). Pretty much everyone skips this approach for that reason.
- NetBeck 7y agohttps://www.excite.com/ https://www.excite.com/
- 52-6F-62 7y agoBless them for not changing their logo too much. And for their treatment of mobile browsers https://ibb.co/vLBPYTW https://ibb.co/vLBPYTW
- city41 7y agoExcite loads for me, then immediately disappears. There is a JS error in the console: Uncaught (in promise) TypeError: t.apply is not a function
- juststeve 7y agohmm i got a blocked (3rd party) url from nod32.
- dntbnmpls 7y agoWe should have a 20 year ( has it been that long? ) reunion. Get all the cast together. Lycos, Excite, AltaVista, AskJeeves, etc. Google will probably be too cool to attend.
- awl130 7y agoYou're not going to invite Yahoo? :(
- Scoundreller 7y agoOr HotBot? Infoseek?
- cosmodisk 7y agoYahoo is that cool kid from the 5th grade,who ended up being on drugs and with a dead end job.Nope, not invited.
- ianai 7y agoThat is EXACTLY what yahoo turned into!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- whatsmyusername 7y agoDogpile!
- sanatgersappa 7y agoSounds like a dogpile ;-)
- kelp 7y agoI worked at Go2Net when they acquired Dogpile. I was directly involved in migrating it’s systems to our data centers after the acquisition closed. I don’t really remember the tech stack, but it was something like 10-15 web servers, probably pentium II or III. One detail I do remember is the original setup had an Apache log rotation script that would try several times to restart Apache and if it didn’t succeed, it would reboot the server. This ran nightly... Not sure what bug or issue they were working around. But I thought it was quite an aggressive solution!
- pmdulaney 7y agoWhen I entered "bicycle touring" it showed about a dozen links. When I clicked on "More" it showed me the same dozen over again.
- Finnucane 7y agoThat happened to me too.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- vlowther 7y agoAmazingly, so is http://www.zombo.com/ http://www.zombo.com/. It still delivers all it promises
- justchilly 7y agoAppears to be powered by Bing. The search results are nearly identical. More importantly snippets for each site are identical, which is the real giveaway.
- greglindahl 7y agoYep. A lot of folks appear to be pretty confused about retail search engines verses the actual index -- Google, Bing, and (at lower quality) Yandex are the only viable English-language search indices right now. Almost every search box you find on the Internets is powered by one of the three.
- abtinf 7y ago> Google, Bing, and (at lower quality) Yandex are the only And DuckDuckGo.
- kick 7y agoDuckDuckGo is just a metacrawler. Depending on the search, it uses either Yandex or Bing.
- wolco 7y agoDoesn't it maintain it's own index on certain terms based on user actions/feedback that changes the bing results resulted? I thought there was an improvement feedback loop.
- kick 7y agoThat doesn't seem to be the case; the only reason they use r.duckduckgo.com is for redirecting without the REFERER according to their docs, so there doesn't seem to be a way for them to do that.
- codesections 7y agoAccording to DuckDuckGo, > To do that, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google). Do you view that as misleading/incorrect?
- hombre_fatal 7y agoHas the exact same poor search results as Bing. https://search12.lycos.com/web/?q=elm+list https://search12.lycos.com/web/?q=elm+list https://www.bing.com/search?q=elm+list https://www.bing.com/search?q=elm+list Funny I only ever hear someone call Bing good when it's named something else (DDG, Lycos).
- robjan 7y agoWhat are you searching for though? Some people care about the Elm language and some people are looking for information about the tree or location.
- lern_too_spel 7y agoThe "list" in the query string makes the intent clear.
- andrewflnr 7y agoNo, not really. Could be a list of elm tree species, or something even more specific (most famous elm trees, species vulnerable to some disease, etc) that's immediately obvious if you're plugged in to the arborist community instead of the hacker community.
- Trombone12 7y agoNo, "array" would be unambiguous. Asking for a list of different elm species a valid interpretation.
- lern_too_spel 7y agoA valid but very unlikely interpretation, which is the point. Every query is ambiguous, but if certain interpretations are much more likely than others, the search engine should respond accordingly. Someone interested in a list of elm species is much more likely to search for "elm species."
- jccalhoun 7y agoI was just thinking today that I am surprised that whomever owns Ask.com hasn't brought out an Echo clone called Jeeves.
- anoncake 7y agoWow. I tried a few searches and the results actually contained the words I searched for. It's amazing. Lycos must have hired an archeologist to recover this long lost technology from an ancient data center.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- geuis 7y agoNot really. My test is my handle “geuis”. It’s always autocorrected to “genius”. Google and Bing at least have the “did you mean geuis” link. Lycos doesn’t.
- all_these_years 7y agoIt seems to be using Google Analytics and Google fonts...
- cosmodisk 7y agoIn the end it's funny: it shows my location (a borough in London),but when I click on jobs,it shows positions in Nashville... According to Wikipedia, just 3 years ago there were still 500 people working there...
- whatsmyusername 7y agoI'm shocked that tripod is apparently still around.
- rconti 7y ago"Redwood city" weather, complete with lower-case "city"
- winrid 7y agoHi from RWC! :)
- ken 7y agoI tried the search which I used a few weeks ago when someone here claimed that DDG was pretty good. Google found what I wanted above the fold. DDG found it at hit #87 or so (click “next” 7 times). Lycos didn’t find it in the first 100 at least. I used to like Lycos but there’s a reason everyone migrated to Google.
- sjg007 7y agonope. search is not good.
- gnicholas 7y agoLooks like it’s the same as yahoo, down to the search suggestions.
- LittleBobby 7y agoAre they hiring?
- egypturnash 7y agoDamn. I did a vanity search and everything above the fold on my laptop screen was an ad. First thing after that was me, though, so that's alright I guess.
- stevenicr 7y agoSo, it's just like google then. Nice.
- stevenicr 7y agosurprised that searching 'sex chat' all of the top 10 it shows are many of the sites today's current top 3 engines show in the top 20 or 30.. so it's more modern than I expected. However when I click next it just reloads the same results page. Thought it might be a firefox ublock origin thing, but I get the same issue with chrome. No clue what the issue is.
- m3kw9 7y agoI wonder how many times they changed hands
- mindfulhack 7y agoI have been shocked recently at how Google.com is no longer the best search engine at many (legal) things I want to find. Yesterday I was looking for downloadable Word / Excel templates for a certain kind, and wondering why Google wasn't showing me what I KNOW exists on the web. In exasperation I went to Bing.com. In first few results, it showed me exactly what I was looking for. Google say they give us what we want, but my story demonstrates that Google now show what they want us to find. Couldn't help but notice they were significantly de-ranking search results about a competitor's file formats vs. their own. They know I'm looking for DOCX / XLSX files. Ultimately this is good. By using multiple search engines now, I feel like I'm using The Internet again. Google is a censored and corporatised filtering of the web - not the web. This is insane...but it's 2020, and I'm going to check out Lycos.
- ec109685 7y agoThere are a lot of assumptions in this post. A more likely explanation is the search term has been SEO’d to hell.
- mindfulhack 7y agoI'm not in the search engine or SEO industries, but: Isn't it Google's job to deal with that type of thing in order to give us an accurate print-out of what's most relevant to a search query? Would they do the same thing (i.e. do nothing) if SEO was burying their own Google products' search results? My cynicism is necessary for a healthy and thriving ecosystem. It should not be discouraged.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- outside1234 7y agoWhy did it work on Bing then?
- paxy 7y ago
- radmuzom 7y agoI searched for my own name, and in addition to the usual top hits (like LinkedIn), it provided a link to a popular article I have published few days back as the sixth result. In contrast, Google primarily links to "scammy" sites claiming to have my phone number and email address, after the usual hits. If I search with the title of the article above, the only link which appears is that from the R Bloggers aggregator (in fact, it appears to me for some Google does not index the articles in my site at all).
- innagadadavida 7y agoOh wow no ads. This by itself is good enough for me to switch.
- Ceezy 7y agoIt s still a TERRIBLE search engine for who wants to test it....
- JOnAgain 7y agoExperiment: search for “delta“. Delta airlines is the 6th result below (what i think are) 5 ads. Doesn’t seem that good.
- cpolis 7y agoThe pagination on SERP does not work for me - clicking 'next' redirects to the same, 1st page results
- torgian 7y agoI wonder how different the internet would be if we had to pay a dollar a month to use certain search engines. Better privacy? Better search results with no ads? Honesty no idea, but I’d imagine if a million people paid me a dollar a month for a search engine, I could hire seven or eight people and build something more private and better performing... eventually. Too bad that would never happen.
- downvoteme1 7y agoIs anybody able to go past the first 2 pages of search results. Lycos does not show page numbers and it looks like it is repeating old results past page 2
- bborud 7y agoWe used to deliver search to Lycos in the late 1990s / early 2000s. I despised them deeply and the experience taught me that you shouldn't go out of your way to please the wrong customer. Lycos had no taste.
- solarkraft 7y ago"Its search is pretty good"? I entered "cf.lumen" and all the results were completely unrelated ads.
- theklub 7y agoWow, I didn't know this was still around, this is a serious blast from the past.
- jffry 7y agoI used to work in the same building as Lycos, which is how I learned about their (now defunct) zombie-themed weather app, WeatherZombie [1]. The forecast sometimes called for "Rrrrraiiiiiiinnnnnnsssss" [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20140703054940/http://www.weatherzombie.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140703054940/http://www.weathe...
- jedisct1 7y agoIt doesn't seem to be very up to date, and the first query I tried returned a phishing website as a first result.
- tempodox 7y agoGood to know! After Google search has become a bad joke and completely unusable, every alternative is welcome.
- eitland 7y agoWow, just tested it with - a weird old Norwegian word (some of the results it surfaced amazed me), - Angular 9 new features (nice collection og blogs, stackoverflow results etc) - Angular momentum (Nice mix of brands, tutorials etc with the Wikipedia article on top of the results).
- jameshart 7y agoA few years ago, looking out of my Boston suburban office window across a rainy, street-lit 128, I caught a glimpse of a strangely familiar dark shape, out of context. Something from my past. Something I hadn’t seen in a long time, and never expected to see again... It looked for all the world like.. a large, black dog. The mental connections of the symbolism rattled through my mind - folkloric tales of deathly omens, Conan-Doyle’s hound, Harry Potter’s uncle, Churchill’s dark companion... Through the rain, my eyes focused and it became clear: LYCOS. Apparently they’d leased some space in the MGH building, and enough funding to spring for a rooftop sign. They’re not there any more - moved into a small Waltham Main Street office in 2015 I believe. But, as with this article, they keep showing up.. that black dog... reminding us of... something. Why have they turned up, here, now? What could it mean?
- jitendrac 7y agosearches are identical to the results from duckduckgo, looks like they are using Bing.
- misterti 7y agoIn the first five seconds on the site i noticed the temperature is not in my local unit. I tried to change it to degrees C, but it won't work.
- Borlands 7y ago404 all this traffic from hackernews was too much for the 90s
- TimonVS 7y agoWhen you search for "Google" you get no results. That's kinda funny.