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...
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.
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.
No. Terra Networks wants to sell its entire Lycos, Inc. subsidiary for approximately $200 million -- not just the domain name.
Lycos, Inc. includes: Angelfire, HTML Gear, Lycos Mail, Matchmaker, Quote.com, Raging Bull, Sonique, Tripod, Webmonkey/Hotwired, and Wired News. It also has partnerships to create several co-branded Web sites. So, there are very valuable assets here.
My prediction: Ask Jeeves is likely thinking very heavily about acquiring Lycos to expand its distribution further. (It recently acquired Interactive Search Holdings for $343 million in cash and stock. ISH assets include Excite, iWon, My Search, and My Way, to name a few.) The more distribution Ask Jeeves has, the more money it can demand from Google -- which accounts for 70% of Ask Jeeves revenue. It currently takes 80 cents on the dollar, with Google taking 20 cents. With the purchase of ISH, Jeeves can probably demand 85. With Lycos too, it could quite easily get 90 cents. So, financially and strategically, Lycos would make sense for Jeeves.
Other possible candidates who might be interested in Lycos include InfoSpace, Primedia subsidiary About, Inc., or possibly even Google itself.
Lycos won't die -- it'll just change hands and be restructured. I guarantee it.
Cheers,
Doug
Doug Mehus http://doug.mehus.info/
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.
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.
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
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