Lycos

Lycos is an Internet Search Engine and Web Directory . It was born from a research project by Dr. Michael Mauldin of Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University in 1994 . 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 (a popular site for people building their own amateur websites), WhoWhere (a people search engine + web email site), 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 , a subsidiary of the Spanish telephone company Telefónica , in October 2000 , and 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.) The selling price was $12.5 billion dollars.

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. Lycos, which had impressed Wall Street with optimistic numbers, had failed to deeply impress users.

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 the purchase price. 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 acquired by Telefónica.

Lycos remained in business with a new management team in early 2006 .

LYCOS NETWORK SITES