Lycos
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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| Type | ??? |
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| Founded | 1994 |
| Headquarters |  Waltham, Massachusetts, United States |
| Industry | Internet |
| Products | Search Engine and Web Portal |
| Revenue |  $ ? billion (2006) |
| Operating income | $ ? billion (2006) |
| Net income |  $ ? billion (2006) |
| Employees | ??? (2006) |
| Parent | Daum Communications |
| Website | Lycos Search Home |
Lycos is an Internet web portal. It started as a search engine developed by Dr. Michael Mauldin of Carnegie Mellon University in 1994, but since it became a portal, has bought search functionality from outside vendors, currently ask.com.
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[edit] Introduction
The original Lycos search engine went on to be used in Carnegie Mellon's Informedia Digital Library project. The name "Lycos" is short for the Lycosidae, the wolf spiders, which actively hunt for their prey.
Shortly after the development of the Lycos Search Engine, the Lycos company was formed using venture capital from CMGI and initial internal support from Carnegie Mellon. The CEO of the Lycos company was Bob Davis, a native of Boston who moved the headquarters of Lycos to Massachusetts from Pittsburgh, and concentrated on building it into an advertising-supported Web Portal, arguably at the expense of the information retrieval research on which the company was founded.
In 1996, the company had a successful IPO, despite a near total lack of revenue. In 1998, it acquired Tripod, the people search engine WhoWhere, and Wired Digital.
Lycos Europe was a joint venture between Bertelsmann and Lycos, but has always been a distinct corporate entity. Although Lycos Europe is the largest of the overseas ventures, several other companies also entered into joint venture agreements, including Lycos Canada, Lycos Korea, and Lycos Asia.
The Lycos company was purchased by Terra Networks, S.A., in October 2000 for 12.5 billion dollars. The merged company was renamed Terra Lycos yet the Lycos brand was the US franchise. Overseas, the company continued to be known as Terra Networks, S.A.
Lycos' business withered after the dotcom crash of 2001, when it faded out in the face of Google's domination of the search market, and Yahoo!'s domination of the portal market.
In August 2, 2004, Terra announced that it was selling Lycos to Seoul, South Korea-based Daum Communications Corporation for $95.4 million in cash, less than 1% of Terra's initial $12.5 billion investment. In October 2004, the transaction closed, and the company name was changed back to Lycos, Inc. The remaining Terra half of the business was subsequently reacquired by Telefónica.
Lycos remained in business with a new management team in early 2006. In 2006, Wired News which had been part of Lycos since the purchase of Wired Digital in 1998, was sold to Conde Nast and re-merged with Wired Magazine. The Lycos Finance division, best known for Quote.com, was sold to International Data Corporation. GetRelevant was sold to Primis Marketing Group in November 2006.
Since 2005 Lycos image search is provided by Picsearch. Text search is powered by Ask.com.
[edit] Lycos Network sites
- Angelfire [1], a Lycos property providing free webhosting
- Gamesville [2], a Lycos site for online gaming
- Hotbot [3], a Lycos-owned search engine
- HtmlGear [4], a Lycos property providing web-page addons (guestbooks, etc.)
- Tripod.com [5], a Lycos property providing free webhosting
- Webmonkey [6], web-building help and tutorials
- WhoWhere.com [7], a people search engine
[edit] Lycos-branded sites
- Lycos Domains [8], Internet domain name purchasing
- Lycos Mail [9], free email provider, formerly known as Mailcity.com.
- Lycos Planet [10], Lycos social networking and light web-building site. It is the successor to Lycos Circles which was shut down in September 2005.
- Lycos Retriever [11], an automatically generated information summarization service.
- Lycos Cinema [12], an IE6 only online video and social networking site.
[edit] Former Lycos sites
- GetRelevant, [13] a Lycos online advertising site
- Quote.com and Raging Bull, a finance site
- Matchmaker.com, a dating site
- Wired.com [14], the online arm of Wired Magazine
