This article is about the search engine. For the former corporation Terra Lycos, see Terra Networks. For the defunct European venture, see Lycos Europe.
This section needs to be updated. Please help update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information.(January 2019)
Lycos is a university spin-off that began in May 1994 as a research project by Michael Loren Mauldin of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Lycos Inc. was formed with approximately US$2 million in venture capital funding from CMGI. Bob Davis became the CEO and first employee of the new company in 1995, and concentrated on building the company into an advertising-supported web portal, 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.[5][6]
In April 1996, the company completed the fastest initial public offering from inception to offering in NASDAQ (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! and Excite.[7] Lycos started offering e-mail services in October 1997,[8] the same year it became one of the first profitable Internet businesses in the world. In 1998, Lycos acquired Tripod.com for $58 million in an attempt to "break into the portal market".[9]
Lycos Europe was a joint venture between Lycos and the Bertelsmann 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.[10]
Lycos was one of the most popular websites on the internet, ranking 8th in 1997, and peaking at 4th in both 1999 and 2001.[11]
On May 16, 2000, near the peak of the dot-com bubble, Lycos announced its intent to be acquired by Terra Networks, the Internet arm of the Spanish telecommunications giant Telefónica, for $12.5 billion.[12] 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.[13] 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.[13]
In August 2004, Terra announced that it was selling Lycos to Seoul, South Korea–based Daum Communications Corporation, now Kakao, for $95.4 million in cash, less than 2% of Terra's initial multibillion-dollar investment.[13] In October 2004, the transaction closed and the company name was changed back to Lycos.[13]
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.[13] 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, which had been part of Lycos since the purchase of Wired Digital in 1998, was sold[13] to Condé Nast Publications and re-merged with Wired Magazine. The Lycos Finance division, best known for Quote.com and RagingBull.com, was sold[13] to FT Interactive Data Corporation in February 2006, while its online dating site, Matchmaker.com, was sold[13] to Date.com. In 2006, Lycos regained ownership of the Lycos trademark from Carnegie Mellon University, allowing the company to rename to Lycos, Inc.[13]
During 2006, Lycos introduced several media services, including Lycos Phone which combined video chat, real-time video on demand, and an MP3 player.[14] 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.[15] In February 2007, Lycos MIX was launched, allowing users to pull video clips from YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo! Video and MySpace Video. Lycos MIX also allowed users to create playlists where other users could add video comments and chat in real-time.[16]
As part of a corporate restructuring to focus on mobile, social networks and location-based services, Daum sold Lycos for $36 million in August 2010 to Ybrant Digital, an Internet marketing company based in Hyderabad, India.[17][18][19] 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 Kakao) as receiver of Ybrant's 56% ownership interest in Lycos.[20]
In May 2012, Lycos announced the appointment of former employee Rob Balazy as CEO of Media division of Lycos.[21]
In September 2014, Ed Noel was appointed in place of Rob and manages the operations under the title of General Manager of Lycos Media.[22]
In June 2015, Lycos announced a pair of wearable devices, called Band and Ring.[23]
LookSmart is an American search advertising, content management, online media, and technology company. It provides search, machine learning and chatbot technologies as well as pay-per-click and contextual advertising services.
MP3.com was a website operated by Paramount Global publishing tabloid-style news items about digital music and artists, songs, services, and technologies. It is better known for its original incarnation as a legal, free music-sharing service, named after the popular music file format MP3, popular with independent musicians for promoting their work. That service was shut down on December 2, 2003, by CNET, which, after purchasing the domain name, established the current MP3.com site.
Daum is a South Korean web portal. It offers various Internet services to web users, including a popular free web-based e-mail, messaging services, shopping, news, and webtoon services. The word "Daum" means "next" and also "diverse voices" in Korean. After competing with Yahoo Korea and Naver in the 2000s and 2010s, it has undergone a extended period of decline after its merger with Kakao in 2014, leading to the slow phasing-out of the Daum name in various services, including changing its name from Daum Kakao to Kakao, the migration of its accounts to Kakao accounts, and the closure or renaming into Kakao-branded services of various services, such as Kakao Webtoon and KakaoTV.
Excite is an American website operated by IAC that provides outsourced internet content such as a metasearch engine, with outsourced weather and news content on the main page. As of 2024, all of Excite's operations are controlled by services outside of the business.
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 popular search engines on the World Wide Web. The domain was sold in 2016 and was used for other unrelated purposes for several years. Hotbot search engine was relaunched in 2022 under new ownership and with a different technology.
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, Terra operated as a web portal or Internet access provider in the United States, Spain and 16 Latin American countries. It was founded in 1999 as Terra Networks, S.A., a publicly traded company with Telefónica as its main shareholder. All outstanding shares were purchased by Telefónica in 2017, making Terra a wholly owned subsidiary.
Xoom was an early dot-com company that provided free unlimited space web hosting, similar to GeoCities. The domain "xoom.com" is now held by the Xoom Corporation, an international-focused money transfer website run by PayPal.
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 corporate structure with Lycos, Inc. (USA) other than the licensed use of their name in Europe, but Lycos Europe was formed as a joint-venture between Bertelsmann and Telefonica, who owned Lycos Inc. through Terra Lycos. On 26 November 2008, Lycos Europe announced that it was to shut down and sell its remaining assets.
StarMedia is a Latin American Internet brand, co-founded in August 1996 by Fernando Espuelas and Jack Chen as the first pan-regional Internet portal for Spanish and Portuguese speaking audiences.
SK Communications KRX: 066270 is a South Korean tech company that owns and operates popular web portal Nate. It offers Internet access and telecommunications services for residences and businesses. SK Communications was founded in 1999 as Lycos Korea, a 50-50 venture of Lycos of the United States and Mirae Corp. of South Korea. The firm was sold to SK Telecom in 2002 and changed its name to SK Communications. SK Telecom currently holds 85.9 percent of its shares.
NeoPlanet was a Trident-shell graphical web browser initially released in 1997 by New York–based Bigfoot International, Inc. and later maintained and developed by its subsidiary NeoPlanet, Inc. It was one of the first browsers to be fully skinnable.
Jubii is a webportal based in Copenhagen. Jubii provides a search engine and other services, including e-mail.
CNET is an American media website that publishes reviews, news, articles, blogs, podcasts, and videos on technology and consumer electronics globally. CNET originally produced content for radio and television in addition to its website before applying new media distribution methods through its internet television network, CNET Video, and its podcast and blog networks.
Quack.com was an early voice portal company. The domain name later was used for Quack, an iPad search application from AOL.
WebChat Broadcasting System, or WBS for short, is a virtual community created during the 1990s. Supported by online advertising, it was one of few services at the time to offer free integrated community services including chat rooms, message boards, and free personal web pages. Extremely popular during the mid to late 1990s in the era prior to the Dot-com bust, WBS was at that time the largest and best-known social media website on the internet. In 1998, WBS was acquired by the search engine Infoseek, which was in turn acquired by Disney/ABC. The original WebChat Broadcasting System closed on 15 September 1999 after its chat rooms were integrated into Disney's existing Go Network chat rooms. A revival of WBS was launched in 2009 and is virtually identical to the original community.
RagingBull.com is a website focused on financial literacy and day trading.
The Brightcom Group is a digital marketing company founded in 2000 and headquartered in Hyderabad, India with offices in US, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Mexico, UK, France, Germany, Sweden, Ukraine, Serbia, Israel, China, India, and Australia, and with representatives or partners in Poland, and Italy. It ranked 400th in the Fortune India 500 list in 2020.
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 rebranded once more, reverting simply to Kakao.
ChickClick was an American website for women that was online from 1998 to 2002. It was created by Heidi Swanson as a web portal for websites created by young women. The website also served as an online community, with a message board and Internet radio program called ChickClick Radio. It also provided a free e-mail and web hosting service, known as Chickmail and Chickpages respectively.
↑ Price, Christopher (December 15, 1998). "Gateway to the future: Christopher Price gives the lowdown on the sites which offer not only a way into the worldwide web but so much more". Financial Times. p.16.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
