

Lycos, poster child of Internet boom, sells for just $36M - masshightech
http://www.masshightech.com/stories/2010/08/16/daily1-Lycos-sold-for-36M.html

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jgilliam
Lycos 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.

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jtbigwoo
I 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.)

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jgilliam
The 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.

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kalid
What a great example of killing the golden goose. "Yes, I spent a full minute
clicking through your results to find what I needed. You showed me 3 more ads
than normal, and now I'll never, ever, return."

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SandB0x
Ah, 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.

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Ravenlock
Oh 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.

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Luyt
I used Copernicus for that.

~~~
shrikant
You likely mean Copernic, the big competitor to Google Desktop Search.

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StavrosK
Oh wow, blast from the past. That thing still exists?

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mpk
Considering I figured they'd died shortly after the bust, 36M doesn't sound
that bad to me.

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nopassrecover
Yeah 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
_I'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 :-)

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hugh3
If they relaunched it I might use it for retro charm.

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ShabbyDoo
So, who profited in 1999 when Lycos was sold for $5+B? Some quick Googling
didn't result in any answers.

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olegk
It 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.

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kierank
The way it looks now, you could easily mistake it for one of those spammy
search pages: <http://www.lycos.com/>

~~~
adnam
Complete with pixelated images in the news ticker

~~~
ldite
...and Google Analytics bug. Ha.

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st3fan
"The quality of content and tools offered by Lycos has always attracted the
best of the consumers across the world."

Seriously? Like what?

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GavinB
We all thought it was dead, but it's still ranked 194th by compete.com, with
over 6 million uniques per month.

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nopassrecover
It'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.

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snorkel
I 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.

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elblanco
Wow, I had no idea Daum was the owner. Daum is _huge_ in S. Korea.

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coderdude
Interesting. 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
I have a feeling that must have been some kind of product placement. I've
rarely seen anybody in Korea not on Daum or Naver.

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henrikschroder
At least they did better than Lycos Europe which liquidated last year.

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2mt_stephan
Give those "just" $36M to me. Thx.

