Lycos, Inc. (stylized as LYCOS), is a

web search engine A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on World Wide Web, the Web in response to a user's web query, query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the sea ...

and

web portal A web portal is a specially designed website that brings information from diverse sources, like emails, online forums and search engines, together in a uniform way. Usually, each information source gets its dedicated area on the page for displayin ...

established in 1994, spun out of

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institu ...

. Lycos also encompasses a network of email, web hosting, social networking, and entertainment websites. The company is based in

Waltham, Massachusetts Waltham ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, and was an early center for the labor movement as well as a major contributor to the Technological and industrial history of the United States, American Industrial Revoluti ...

, and is a subsidiary of Ybrant Digital.

Etymology

The word "Lycos" is short for "Lycosidae", which is

Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...

for "

wolf spider Wolf spiders are members of the family Lycosidae (), named for their robust and agile hunting skills and excellent eyesight. They live mostly in solitude, hunt alone, and usually do not spin webs. Some are opportunistic hunters, pouncing upon ...

History

Lycos is a

university spin-off University spin-offs (also known as university spin-outs) are companies that transform technological inventions developed from university research that are likely to remain unexploited otherwise. They are a subcategory of research spin-offs. Prom ...

that began in May 1994 as a research project by

Michael Loren Mauldin Michael Loren "Fuzzy" Mauldin () (born March 23, 1959) is an American retired computer scientist and the inventor of the Lycos web search engine. He has written 2 books, 10 refereed papers, and several technical reports on natural-language p ...

Pittsburgh Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, United States, and its county seat. It is the List of municipalities in Pennsylvania#Municipalities, second-most populous city in Pennsylvania (after Philadelphia) and the List of Un ...

. Lycos Inc. was formed with approximately US$2 million in

venture capital Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity financing provided by firms or funds to start-up company, startup, early-stage, and emerging companies, that have been deemed to have high growth potential or that have demonstrated high growth in ...

funding from

CMGI Steel Connect, Inc. is an American company that provides supply chain management services to software companies. History The company was formed in 1968 as College Marketing Group by Glenn and Gail Mathews. At first, the company sold mailing lists ...

. Bob Davis became the CEO and first employee of the new company in 1995, and concentrated on building the company into an advertising-supported

, led by Bill Townsend, who served as Vice President, Advertising. Lycos enjoyed several years of growth during the 1990s and became the most visited online destination in the world in 1999, with a global presence in more than 40 countries. In April 1996, the company completed the fastest

initial public offering An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investm ...

from inception to offering in

NASDAQ The Nasdaq Stock Market (; National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations) is an American stock exchange based in New York City. It is the most active stock trading venue in the U.S. by volume, and ranked second on the list ...

(LCOS) history, ending its first day with a market value of $300 million. It also became the first search engine to go public, before its big rivals

Yahoo! Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, and its a ...

and

Excite Excitation, excite, exciting, or excitement may refer to: * Excitation (magnetic), provided with an electrical generator or alternator * ''Exite'', a series of racing video games published by Nintendo starting with '' Excitebike'' * Excite (web por ...

. Lycos started offering

e-mail Electronic mail (usually shortened to email; alternatively hyphenated e-mail) is a method of transmitting and receiving Digital media, digital messages using electronics, electronic devices over a computer network. It was conceived in the ...

services in October 1997, the same year it became one of the first profitable

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the Global network, global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking, network of networks ...

businesses in the world. In 1998, Lycos acquired

Tripod.com Tripod.com is a web hosting service owned by Lycos. Originally aiming its services to college students and young adults, it was one of several sites trying to build online communities during the 1990s. As such, Tripod formed part of the first wav ...

for $58 million in an attempt to "break into the portal market".

Lycos Europe Lycos Europe was a pan-European network of websites, offering services including communication tools, online communities, web search, e-commerce, web hosting, homepage building and Internet access. It was an independent corporation, sharing no c ...

was a joint venture between Lycos and the

Bertelsmann The Bertelsmann SE & Co. KGaA, commonly known as Bertelsmann (), is a German privately held company, private multinational corporation, multinational conglomerate (company), conglomerate corporation based in Gütersloh, North Rhine-Westphalia, ...

transnational media corporation, but it has always been a distinct corporate entity. Although Lycos Europe remains the largest of Lycos's overseas ventures, several other Lycos subsidiaries also entered into joint venture agreements including Lycos Canada, Lycos Korea and Lycos Asia. Lycos was one of the most popular websites on the internet, ranking 8th in 1997, and peaking at 4th in both 1999 and 2001. On May 16, 2000, near the peak of the

dot-com bubble The dot-com bubble (or dot-com boom) was a stock market bubble that ballooned during the late-1990s and peaked on Friday, March 10, 2000. This period of market growth coincided with the widespread adoption of the World Wide Web and the Interne ...

, Lycos announced its intent to be acquired by

Terra Networks Terra was a Spanish Internet multinational company owned by Telefónica. It was headquartered in Spain and had offices in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, the United States and Peru. Part of the Telefónica Group (the former Spanish public tele ...

, the Internet arm of the Spanish telecommunications giant , for $12.5 billion. The acquisition price represented a return of nearly 3,000 times the company's initial venture capital investment and about 20 times its initial public offering valuation. The transaction closed in October 2000 and the merged company was renamed Terra Lycos, although the Lycos brand continued to be used in the United States. Overseas, the company continued to be known as Terra Networks. Having been set back by the dot-com bubble burst, Lycos abandoned its own search crawler in late 2001, and started using

FAST Fast or FAST may refer to: Arts and entertainment * "Fast" (Juice Wrld song), 2019 * "Fast" (Luke Bryan song), 2016 * "Fast" (Sueco song), 2019 * "Fast" (GloToven song), 2019 * ''Fast'', an album by Custom, 2002 * ''Fast'', a 2010 short fil ...

. In August 2004, Terra announced that it was selling Lycos to

Seoul Seoul, officially Seoul Special Metropolitan City, is the capital city, capital and largest city of South Korea. The broader Seoul Metropolitan Area, encompassing Seoul, Gyeonggi Province and Incheon, emerged as the world's List of cities b ...

South Korea South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea (ROK), is a country in East Asia. It constitutes the southern half of the Korea, Korean Peninsula and borders North Korea along the Korean Demilitarized Zone, with the Yellow Sea to the west and t ...

–based Daum Communications Corporation, now

Kakao Kakao Corporation () is a South Korean internet conglomerate headquartered in Jeju City. It was formed through the merger of Daum Communications and the original Kakao Inc. in 2010. The company was renamed Daum Kakao in 2014. In 2015, it was ...

, for $95.4 million in cash, less than 2% of Terra's initial multibillion-dollar investment. In October 2004, the transaction closed and the company name was changed back to Lycos. Under new ownership, Lycos began to refocus its strategy. The company moved away from being a search-centric portal and toward a community destination for broadband entertainment content. With a new management team in place, Lycos also began divesting properties that were not core to its new strategy. In July 2006,

Wired News ''Wired'' is a bi-monthly American magazine that focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, and politics. It is published in both print and online editions by Condé Nast. The magazine has been in publication since its l ...

, which had been part of Lycos since the purchase of Wired Digital in 1998, was sold to

Condé Nast Publications Condé is a French place name and personal name. It is ultimately derived from a Celtic word, "Condate", meaning "confluence" (of two rivers) - from which was derived the Romanised form "Condatum", in use during the Roman period, and thence to ...

and re-merged with ''

Wired Magazine ''Wired'' is a bi-monthly American magazine that focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, and politics. It is published in both print and Online magazine, online editions by Condé Nast. The magazine has been in public ...

''. The Lycos Finance division, best known for Quote.com and RagingBull.com, was sold to FT Interactive Data Corporation in February 2006, while its online dating site,

Matchmaker.com Matchmaker.com was the first online dating service. It was founded in 1986 and first operated via a bulletin board system. Members completed a questionnaire that enabled the platform to rank potential matches based on compatibility. History Ma ...

, was sold to Date.com. In 2006, Lycos regained ownership of the Lycos trademark from Carnegie Mellon University, allowing the company to rename to Lycos, Inc. During 2006, Lycos introduced several media services, including Lycos Phone which combined video chat, real-time video on demand, and an MP3 player. In November 2006, Lycos began to roll out applications centered on social media, including its video application, Lycos Cinema, that featured simultaneous watch and chat functionality. In February 2007, Lycos MIX was launched, allowing users to pull video clips from

YouTube YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim who were three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in ...

Google Video Google Video was a free video hosting service, originally launched by Google on January 25, 2005. Initially focused on searching TV program transcripts, it soon evolved to allow hosting video clips on Google servers and embedding onto other ...

Yahoo! Video The company Yahoo! ran several similar video services. Yahoo! Video, a video hosting service, was established in 2006. Later, the ability to upload videos was removed, changing it to a more pure video on demand service; the website became a port ...

and

MySpace Myspace (formerly stylized as MySpace, currently myspace; and sometimes my␣, with an elongated Whitespace character#Substitute images, open box symbol) is a social networking service based in the United States. Launched on August 1, 2003, it w ...

Video. Lycos MIX also allowed users to create playlists where other users could add video comments and chat in real-time. As part of a corporate restructuring to focus on mobile, social networks and

location-based service Location-based service (LBS) is a general term denoting software service (economics), services which use geographic data and information to provide services or information to users. LBS can be used in a variety of contexts, such as health, indoor ...

s, Daum sold Lycos for $36 million in August 2010 to Ybrant Digital, an

Internet marketing The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a network of networks that consists of private, publ ...

company based in

Hyderabad, India Hyderabad is the capital and largest city of the Indian state of Telangana. It occupies on the Deccan Plateau along the banks of the Musi River (India), Musi River, in the northern part of Southern India. With an average altitude of , much ...

. Ybrant Digital paid $20 million at signing and there has been a legal dispute over magnitude of the second installment between Ybrant and Daum. In 2018, a New York court ruled in favor of Daum and appointed Daum (by then merged with

) as receiver of Ybrant's 56% ownership interest in Lycos. In May 2012, Lycos announced the appointment of former employee Rob Balazy as CEO of Media division of Lycos. In September 2014, Ed Noel was appointed in place of Rob and manages the operations under the title of General Manager of Lycos Media. In June 2015, Lycos announced a pair of wearable devices, called Band and Ring. Lycos Internet was renamed Brightcom Group in May 2018.

Lycos Network sites

Angelfire Angelfire is an Internet service that offers website services. It is owned by Lycos, which also owns Tripod.com. Angelfire operates separately from Tripod.com and includes features such as blog building and a photo gallery builder. Free webpag ...

, a Lycos property which provides paid web hosting, blogging and web publishing tools *

Tripod A tripod is a portable three-legged frame or stand, used as a platform for supporting the weight and maintaining the stability of some other object. The three-legged (triangular stance) design provides good stability against gravitational loads ...

, a Lycos property providing paid web hosting, blogging and web publishing tools

Lycos-branded sites

* Lycos Chat, a photo chatting community. * Lycos Domains, Internet

domain name In the Internet, a domain name is a string that identifies a realm of administrative autonomy, authority, or control. Domain names are often used to identify services provided through the Internet, such as websites, email services, and more. ...

purchasing * Lycos Mail, an e-mail provider formerly known as Mailcity.com. (As of 15 May 2018 providing only paid services.Lycos "End of free service FAQ" (dated 09 April 2018).
Accessed 2018-04-12.) * Lycos Weather * Lycos Yellow Pages

Former Lycos sites

* Chickmail, a free e-mail service sponsored by ChickClick * Chickpages, a free web hosting service sponsored by ChickClick * Estromail, a free e-mail service sponsored by Estronet * Estropages, a free web hosting service sponsored by Estronet * Gamesville, Lycos multi-player gaming site * GetRelevant.com, a Lycos online advertising site * Gurlmail, a free e-mail service sponsored by Delia's for Gurl.com * Gurlpages, a free web hosting service sponsored by Delia's for Gurl.com *

Hotbot HotBot is a Canadian web search engine owned by HotBot Limited, whose key principal is Kristen Richardson. The search engine was initially launched in North America in 1996 by ''Wired'' magazine. During the 1990s, it was one of the most popul ...

, a search engine * InsiderInfo * Lycos Radio, allowed users to create and host their own free Internet radio shows *

, a dating site * Quote.com and RagingBull.com, finance sites *

Weather Zombie Weather Zombie was a website and mobile app for iOS that provided zombie-themed weather forecasting via a weather data feed from AccuWeather. It was created by Lycos and launched in mid-October 2010. Weather Zombie provided worldwide weather ...

, a Lycos property which provided weather forecasts, with a zombie theme, via

AccuWeather AccuWeather, Inc. is a private-sector American media company that provides commercial weather forecasting services. AccuWeather was founded in 1962 by Joel N. Myers. The company adopted the name 'AccuWeather' in 1971. AccuWeather is headquar ...

Webmonkey Webmonkey was an online tutorial website composed of various articles on building webpages from backend to frontend. The site covered many aspects of developing on the web like programming, database, multimedia, and setting up web storefronts. The ...

, web-building help and tutorials * WhoWhere.com, a people search engine * Wired.com, the online arm of ''Wired'' magazine

References

External links

* {{Authority control 1994 establishments in Pennsylvania 1996 initial public offerings Companies formerly listed on the Nasdaq 2000 mergers and acquisitions 2004 mergers and acquisitions Carnegie Mellon University software Companies based in Waltham, Massachusetts Dot-com bubble Online mass media companies of the United States Internet properties established in 1994 Internet search engines Technology companies based in the Boston area American companies established in 1994 University spin-offs Web portals Webmail Kakao Web 1.0