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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")."
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 AltaVista suffered from an outdated ranking system and stale crawl data as it got passed from investment group to investment group.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.
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.
I'm going to be short on details because I'm a tad tired right now. But Lycos had a decent media search, back in the day. I clearly recall using it to find MIDIs because it kindly listed the sizes of the media with a link directly to the MIDI file. As such, it was normally pretty easy to pick out all of the different versions of a song there were out there. This was back when the advanced/media search was at lycospro.lycos.com, IIRC.
Not having had a very impressive machine at the time, I can't state whether it was a decent enough MP3 search engine. Listening to them using whatever version of WinAmp existed at that time pretty much locked the machine to all other uses. But this did predate Napster, and people had to get their MP3s somehow.
You like splinters in your crotch? -Jon Caldara
$200 billion going in, $12.5 billion going out.
:-).
That should be "$12.5 billion going in, $200 million going out"
"as if nothing were solid...and that would be the end of the world, not fire and brimstone, but goo."--Rand
Xoom got shut down when General Electric gave up on their failed NBCi project. Angelfire is also a part of Lycos so they'll likely get the same fate as Tripod.
And then there was one... GeoCities is the last of the "free web hosting" companies left standing as an offshoot of Yahoo!
There are tons of free web hosting companies.
When searching google for "free web hosting", notice how Xoom.com shows up on the first page. Although now they're "the smarter way to send money".
The AOL-TW merger was proposed at $124 Billion.
It ended up going through at either $106 or $109 Billion.
Ask Jeeves distributes paid advertising (both in search results and contextually targeted ads on content pages) from the Google AdWords program. Ask Jeeves takes 80 cents per click on a text ad from the AdWords program, with Google taking a 20 cent cut.
Hope this helps,
Doug
Doug Mehus http://doug.mehus.info/
Although now they're "the smarter way to send money".
People oughtta update their links. Most of us know that Google bases result rankings largely on how people link to that site with the relevant keywords (that is why Google Bombing is possible).
Apparently many sites still link to xoom.com with 'free web hosting' or similar. Just Google www.xoom.com then click the "Find web pages that link to www.xoom.com/" link.
bash: rtfm: command not found
It's $12.5 billion going in, $200 million going out. Which means they've wasted more than 59/60th of the value.
What value is that, exactly? I just checked, and the price for www.lyyyycos.com would be $200 for 10 years (pricecheck done here, there are lots of others) so the way I see it, they haven't wasted value. They have started with a hugely inflated value which is now gradually nearing the boundaries of the real world (if there, indeed, is such a thing)
Sigs for Nerds. Sigs that Matter.
That's right - poor wording on my part. They didn't diminsh the value - they just wasted money in the first place by buying Lycos for way too much.
I remember wondering about that amount even back then: I mean, in 2000, Lycos was on its way down already. Perhaps it was different in the US, but over here, people were using Yahoo or Altavista, nobody I knew used for searching or news. (And yes, there is a German Lycos site.)
Interesting aside: Some time ago, Lycos launched a huge media campaign to regain popularity - apparently without much success. Google OTOH managed to become the most popular search engine mainly by woord of mouth. (I know Lycos is a portal, but their ad campaign - the one with the dog - focused on the searching part of things.)
There's always Page 3 ..