Slashdot Mirror
For Sale: Lycos.com
prostoalex writes "Terra Lycos is planning to sell Lycos.com. The price, quoted by News.com.com.com, is in the $200 mln range, while the original acquisition amounted to $12.5 bln. Lycos is currently re-inventing itself as a portal for the new generation with the link to Playboy affiliate placed right on the front page (click on "Adults 18+ only")."
Terra's aquisition of Lycos was an exercise in stupdity. See, Terra's a pretty big company with plenty of successful Spanish-language sites... but there's absoultely no synergy to be found in merging a group of English-langauge sites with Spanish-language sites. You can't share content accross the langages unless you have a ton of people doing translations.
One of the original webcrawling search engines ended up getting bought up by somebody who didn't know what to do with it. So, it got shuffled asside into a "network" of poorly defined brand, and faded into obscurity. Lycos as a search engine is now worthless. Maybe there's some value left in the brand name for somebody who wants to do a relaunch, but this dog has been relauched so many times I don't think you can teach it any new tricks anymore.
The market scorecard shows it exactly... $200 billion going in, $12.5 billion going out. They misplaced 15/16th of the value that they started with.
You won't catch me that easily goatse boy
I'll just wait until they fail to renew the domain and just pay the 35 bucks.
That means Tripod might not be around anymore. WTF are the phishers supposed to use now?
*sigh*
Oh well, there's always geocities...
bash: rtfm: command not found
And on top of that, I can't even hit the back button (just keeps you on the front page) in firefox .8
Is this really the right direction?
Hell, I'll give at least $50. It's a bit high for an opening offer given the current lack of reputation, but I think it's fair.
Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day, but teach a man to phish...
A campy, old-school web portal for sale! I hope they accept COD. It'd look great mounted on the wall above my wet bar with all the vintage neon beer signs. Maybe when I can afford it, I'll get an Altavista to put up next to it. That would rock.
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
Horray! Its been 6 hours of reloading slashdot and finally we get a non-linux story.
Sure, Sun's Java Desktop System was insightful.
And Fedora Core 2 Test 3 was um, interesting.
The Linux Desktop Summit 2004 article was informative (wish I got some maple syrup and a t-shirt)
And the conspiricy theorys in the Turbolinux Licenses Windows Media 9 article were something to wrap my tinfoil hat around
But thank god, slashdot has returned to normal. A sexy search engine story to wet my apatite. Wait, is it how great Google is for running on Linux?! (/me reads TFA). Ok, were safe. Hopefully in a few hours a fud-filled gmail article will come up, or even better cmdrtaco will post this one again for double the pleasure, double the fun.
but seriously, about the maple syrup, hook me up.
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
Lycos is currently re-inventing itself as a portal for the new generation with the link to Playboy affiliate placed right on the front page (click on "Adults 18+ only").
While I'm familiar with many a washed-out pop musician turning to Playboy to boost an aching career, I'd never imagine this trend to extend to websites...
I read once that business.com got the largest amount of money for being sold at something like eight million US dollars. If lycos.com came anywhere close to the 200,000,000 mark, that would be some kind of crazy record.
Got a failed domain that still has a few hundred thousand people a day typing it in forgetting that you bit the dust long ago? Turn it into a porn site and get some cash out of those otherwise useless hits... I can't even count the number of gone-under sites that have pulled that stunt.
anyone else not get that link?
must be some geographical based stuff going on.
I only know the company only by their English web site - Lycos.com, having never spoken Spanish ever as far as I can remember.
Lycos was very important to the world.
They had:
1) A web search engine. Who else had a web search engine besides Yahoo and AltaVista?
2) A web hosting service. Who else had a web hosting service besides GeoCities and AngelFire?
3) An e-mail service. Who else had an e-mail service besides Yahoo and Hotmail?
4) Web games. Who else had web games besides Yahoo and MPlayer?
5) News stories. Wait, no they didn't. I know Yahoo had those.
All of the above was sarcastic.
As you can see, in all five important areas, Lycos was not in the top of each one. Sure, you knew they had each of those, but they weren't leaders at all in ANYTHING. Their idea seemed to be to JUST EXIST and the millions of people on the Internet couldn't just all flock to Yahoo or AltaVista, right? There would always be room for Lycos, right? Even without R&D? A portion of the Internet would use Lycos regardless of competition, and as Internet use grows, Lycos would grow in popularity, right?
Uh, no. They thought, if there are 5 stores in a mall and they are one of them, passerbys, who were in the mall for one of the other stores, many of htem would still visit Lycos, right? Or at least look in. Makes a lot of sense.
However, the Internet is not like that. You could place a store next door to a competitor and steal his visitors. You can place a phonebook ad and steal your competitors visitors as their clients check the phonebook for your competitor's phone number but see your ad next to it. With the internet, an analogy is links connecting the dots. HOWEVER, the problem is, THERE ARE NO LINKS TO COMPETITORS. In other words, if you visit one guy's site, HE WILL NOT HAVE ANY LINKS POINTING TO HIS COMPETITOR'S SITE. Furthermore, all links will be designed to keep you INSIDE HIS OWN SITE. Therefore, actually LIMITING your awareness of other sites.
So, Lycos thought (apparently by their lack of R & D) that they would just advertise and exist and as people flock to Yahoo and Google, they would get a share. Uh.. NO?
The one major remaining portal is Yahoo. They are still leaders in e-mail, games, bought GeoCities, searching, and they had news on their site as long as I can remember. All of Yahoo!'s competitors just 'existed'. Just like hundreds of businesses 'exist' but nobody cares about them. Yahoo made you involved in their life. Yahoo is still kicking, having bought Overture, GeoCities, WebRing, Inktomi, HotJobs: God knows what else.
Even now, with Google doing what they do, Yahoo! is still the overall winner and success story.
Cover your eyes and click this link!
Here's a quick field guide to some of the other pre-Google search engines...
AltaVista: Since it was born as Digital Equipment Corp.'s reasearch project rather than an attempt to make money, Compaq didn't exactly know what they had aquired. AltaVista suffered from an outdated ranking system and stale crawl data as it got passed from investment group to investment group. They ended up as a small fish in the Yahoo food chain at the end.
Excite: After merging with original cable-modem ISP @home, it all went down hill. An unprofitable website merged with a cable modem ISP who hadn't quite yet figured out that throtling user's bandwidth is a requirement to stay alive. In the end, they ended up selling a service for a price than less than it cost... and into the dot-bomb recycle bin they went. The Excite.com site is still up, but it's really just a less ad-intrusive version of iWon, and shares a lot in common with MyWay.com who is also from the same people. iWon, is of course known as a spreader of semi-spyware.
Inktomi/"HotBot": Inktomi got bought up by Yahoo!, and now powers the web results once again after being deposed by Google for a time.
HotBot.com was always just a licensee of Inktomi's data. It started as a spinoff to Wired Magazine, and ended up getting included in the sale of Wired News to Lycos. It's still ticking now as a unified interface for three of the web crawlers left standing... Inktomi, Google, and Ask Jeeves. They most likely will be part of this spinoff of what's left of Lycos.
Infoseek: Infoseek sold out at the height of the market to the mouse ears. Disney had the bright idea of uniting all of their web content under the Go.com brand, which also would allow all of the Disney-owned sites to share Go.com cookies so that a registered user's cookie from abc.go.com could also be read by espn.go.com. Infoseek would become the search engine portal that'd power the www.go.com portal at the center of the Go Network. A few years later, Disney realized their mistake. Nobody cared about the search engine portal... so they gutted the Go Network brand and turned www.go.com into nothing but a bare-bones portal with a Google-powered search. Inktomi as a search engine is no more. However, they did keep go.com domain in use in order to keep that cookie-sharing going.
GoTo.com: They were never really a search engine, they just licensed Inktomi's results. However, they invented the pay-per-click-search-placement model years before Google came on the scene. When Disney launched the Go Network, they sued saying that the Disney logo and branding was too close to their own, and won forcing the Go Network to change its logo. Shortly after that, they changed their name to Overture and got out of the direct search portal business. They've since been snapped up by Yahoo. Overture technically owns AltaVista just to show where they are in the pecking order over there.
My bet is that Microsoft will buy it. They have to do something with all that cash, and they want a search engine and more (redirected) traffic for MSN, which they are having trouble growing. If you cannot earn eyeballs, buy 'em.
Table-ized A.I.
Google cache of lycos.com.
The "reinvention" mentioned in the original posting seems to only apply to the US site, and other countries appear to be automatically redirected. So here's the link for anyone who can't see the site.
The sites are completely different, it isn't just the adults 18+ link.
For any Canadians out there, the only way I can figure out to view the lycos.com page is through the Google cache. It seems that you get redirected to lycos.ca otherwise.
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
They've obviously realized like so many others that porn is the real gold mine of the internet.
I hope this is not the end of http://models.lycos.com/
Did anyone else get the ad for Shower Shock caffeinated soap on the Lycos front page? It leads to a link to a search for it, which then leads to ThinkGeek. Odd.
I meta-mod all positive moderation Unfair, because it's abuse of the system.
Thanks Carnegie Mellon! Near direct links to pr0n from a website that you pretty much claim is yours. What the hell are you people thinking?
Lycos® is a registered trademark of Carnegie Mellon University.
Maybe SCO should buy it. Both companies have a similar client base and future.
None whatsoever.
Si tacuisses philosophus mansisses. If you had kept quiet, you would have remained a philosopher.
Yep, CMU is a rathole.
GO STANFORD
Our boys would never pull shit like that.
Anybody want a peanut?
The market scorecard shows it exactly... $200 billion going in, $12.5 billion going out. They misplaced 15/16th of the value that they started with.
It's $12.5 billion going in, $200 million going out. Which means they've wasted more than 59/60th of the value.
As an aside: I don' think there ever was a $200 billion Dot-Com-Merger, was there? (How much was AOL-TimeWarner again?)
Jens
Lycos is the eighth largest web portal, with over three hundred subscribers. Their site features time and weather, email, search, an "About Us" page and a Terms of Service page.
Definitely a bargain at $200 million.
Maybe someone could turn it into a sort of "living museum" so future generations can experience an actual late 20th century web portal. Little footnotes* indicating areas of historical interest could be added.
*Like this one. Footnotes are used to convey additional information without interrupting the flow of the text.
Unknown host pong.
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
I guess the beancounters over at Lycos are still partying like it's 1999.
Can someone go over and tell them about the dot-com bust please?
$200m indeed -- bah!
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
anyone know what the story is with northernlight.com?
looking at their home page now, it looks like they went corporate/ enterprise search
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Google is Ask Jeeves customer? *scratches head*
Of course a lot of washed-out pop musicians appear in Playboy... about the time their careers go, they've just turned 18!
but there's absoultely no synergy to be found in merging a group of English-langauge sites with Spanish-language sites. You can't share content accross the langages unless you have a ton of people doing translations.
You must not live anywhere in the southern half of the US where everything is in both English and Spanish.
Speak English or Die!
If this is true, what does this mean for lycos.com?
Nothing is so smiple that it can't get screwed up.
In other news this evening, the Lycos dog was killed when someone typed in the words "1986 Chevrolet Caprice Front Bumper" into the search field and hit the "Go Get It" button. Services will be held at the fire hydrant outside of Arlington National Cemetary at noon.
If carrots got you drunk, rabbits would be fucked up. - Comedian Mitch Hedberg R.I.P. 03/30/68-2/24/05
All those smiling people can't be wrong!
I do not know if only I feel this way about the look of the new Lycos website design, but do you not think it looks somewhat cheap and unprofessional, in the style of "search engines" which are in fact just advertisement whores appearing in various pastly infamous domains? The front page looks hideous as the preponderant yellow does not look nice at all. As for the links of 'top searches', it could be "helpful", but at the same time, what that section mostly does is clutter up my screen with links I mostly do not care about. The links to Lycos' other services are existant albeit the general layout and design makes the page look amateurish and cheap.
The search results page is not too bad, and the news search results page bearing the same design, then that aspect is alright in a sufficient way; but the image search results page definitly loses out to Google 's in my opinion -- the system warned me that the files I was about to view contain adult material, when in fact they didn't, and the search results' layout itself was idiotic. As for the shopping section, I believe Google's Froogle does a good stab at this section, and even more impressively so since it is more recent than Lycos'. I also forget to mention the ridiculous web hosting service, which is just truly unsatisfying in terms of space and service itself.
All in all, I think Lycos is just relying on its reputation now, just as MSN Search is relying on users utilizing Internet Explorer's search function. The problem is, it is already beaten by far by Yahoo! and probably Google will progressively transform into a web portal itself, albeit a much less cluttered one than the currently existing platforms. If you ask me, Lycos' death will not be anytime soon though, because there are still thousands of people relying on its services for now; still, it is just a matter of time I would say.
"Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect" -- Linus Torval
Come get some.
for $14, an Xbox and Free voucher for MSCE :)
Is it just me, or are all the fonts all messed up on the Lycos home page?
from lycos.com. All I get is junk advertising services etc.
Sigh what a sad world - the only that's known to make money is pr0n....
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
That's what all link-farms say...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I'm the least prudish of anyone I know, my first graduate paycheck may well be spent on a terabyte SCSI array for my porn collection.
However, 2 links from the lycos home-page are naked boobs, and 3 links away are 5meg hardcore porn clips. I think this is a bit much. If I want to see "Hot Moms" getting banged I'm quite capable of finding them myself using Google. This involves an active step on my part.
Is it just me, or is this a bad thing?
Wow, I haven't been to lycos in *years* and I do mean *years.* Their new lay out is horribly slow and ugly. Why must people do things like that when it's obvious that Google's way of having a front page (and anything else for that matter) is small, slick and effecient. Remember, less is more.
<happiness>beer</happiness>
or location of the browser, maybe? 'cause I don't see an adult link on the home page.
Clear, Dark Skies
Or did it seem every time my Windows machine was browser hijacked the default page was pointing to Lycos? Or the Trojans that infected my machine would pop up Lycos adds?
Lycos is a Trojan.
It used to be one of the premier search engines until Disney bought and ruined it.
Why do these companied do this sort of stuff? What are they thinking?
Big dog: Wwwooof!
Imperious nerd: Fetch me a business model!
Big dog: Wwwooof! [Whooshing noise as faithful LYCOS rushes off into the jungles of cyberspace (oooooh!) to fetch his master a business model.]
[Dead air]
Imperious nerd: Lycos? LYCOS?
I actually used Webmonkey back in the day when I started doing web design. I think they stil have good stuff on their site... Will it disappear as well?
honnold.org - sometimes-rock band, all the time awesome forum
Buy Lycos... party like it's 1999.
Guess I'm not allowed to surf through Lycos for porn. Oh me oh my, whatever will I do?
Oh yeah, I can type the URL in directly.
I talk about stuff.
I really have no idea and have not heard the term before. Thanks!
I don't read or respond to AC posts
This is unfortunately a major problem in the world.
All things ultimately cater to base forms of humanity when they cater to the majority.
The majority of humans care only about satisfying their primal appetites and nothing more.
The only question is, with the spectacular failure of the internet for the reasons you mention, how do we still have people who champion democracy and egalitarianism?
You would think geeks everywhere would realize the masses should not be allowed on the internet, let alone be allowed to have a say in government and ultimately the future direction of humanity itself.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
C'mon! -2!!! You guys are killing me. It's funny. Laugh!
I learned my lesson...no more "Soviet Russia" jokes, I promise. Now quite modding me to death. My karma will never recover. That's what I get for drinking too many Vodka martini's yesterday!
Let me ramble please. Essentially, the idea is a company releases a number of "competing brands" in order to increase the number of brands in the market, thereby offering consumers alternatives to brands the company already owns. Good examples of this are Soap (Lever Bros vs. Colgate-Palmolive) and, to a lesser extent, Soft drinks (Coca-Cola vs PspsiCo -- there's some similarity between the drinks and automobiles, the drink companies create new brands to compete with themselves and their aquisitions, which the automobile companies generally don't).
Automobiles are slightly different beast however, because most of the car companies that fall under a parent's umbrella were simply aquired and not created as a new brand to compete with themselves (a notable and unique exception to this rule being Saturn).
It works better for GM to buy Pontiac, Buick, Chevrolet, Cadillac and Saab because it not only adds a new brand for them (which does does happen, but isn't the the company's true motive), it also removes a market competetor, and moves someone else's innovations into the company. Over time, the aquired companies get integrated as divisions (which is why at first we saw Dodge, Plymoth and Chrysler all their own flavour of Neon, but recently only Dodge makes them).
Eventually, once whatever the aquisition offers the company aside from the brand, has been absorbed, the aquisition gets renamed and later closed or simply closed.
The key difference between a Programmer and a Senior Programmer is that one of them is Mexican.