Lycos, poster child of Internet boom, sells for just $36M | Hacker News Reader

Lycos, poster child of Internet boom, sells for just $36M

masshightech.com

63 pointsmasshightech41 comments

Lycos is a perfect example of an internet company that failed because it was run by sales people and not engineers.

I was a software developer there in the late 90's, and we did some of the first eye-tracking studies on how people used the search engine. What we learned was shocking - no one looked at the flashy ads. The more we tried to make them stand out, the more they looked at the boring text in the middle of the page.

Clearly, the solution was non-flashy ads. Except, that's not what advertisers wanted, and Lycos did whatever advertisers wanted.

I'm sure Google did those same studies when they were working on their ads and saw the same thing. Since they were run by engineers, they made their ads text.

The rest is history.

I think the flashiness would not have mattered so much if Lycos's results had been better. If I recall, the search results I got from Lycos were poorer than WebCrawler or Alta Vista. There wasn't that much difference, though--every search engine's results were filled with spammy crap. Yahoo, Lycos, Excite etc. decided to attack the spam problem with brute force by creating human-edited portals.

When Google appeared on my radar in late 1999/early 2000, it was a revelation. For the first time in many years, I could enter a search term and have a 75% chance of success compared to sub-50% rate of other search engines. The gap in effectiveness was too large for any other search engine to bridge.

(This also sort-of explains why Bing will have a hard time unseating Google. Google has improved to about 95% accuracy for me. Even if Bing gets to 99.9% accuracy, I probably wouldn't notice the difference.)

However your point would seem to reinforce the parent's point: Lycos chose to attack the problem with $$$ ("brute force by creating human-edited portals"), not engineering (better search algorithms; maybe more properly called CS, but you get the idea).

The reason the results were lousy was due to the sales culture. Sales people needed more pages to put banner ads on, so all our efforts went to building a "portal" -- not to improving search. The last thing Lycos wanted was for people to find something somewhere else on the internet.

Wow. That is a very revealing insight.

What a great example of killing the golden goose. "Yes, I spent a full minute clicking through your results to find what I needed. You showed me 3 more ads than normal, and now I'll never, ever, return."

You may be right, you probably are. But stubbornly refusing to give your paying customers what they are willing to pay for is not some magical property of engineers.

> I was a software developer there in the late 90's, and we did some of the first eye-tracking studies on how people used the search engine.

I also find it telling that they let developers / engineers do eye tracking and user research, as opposed to designers / usability people.

> I'm sure Google did those same studies when they were working on their ads and saw the same thing. Since they were run by engineers, they made their ads text.

Google's data-centricism and engineering-informed design decisions have seen much pushback lately, as exemplified by the departure of lead designer Douglas Bowman:

http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html

There were very few UI designers at the time and almost no usability people on the web at all. The fact that they were doing these studies at all is something to be lauded and helped pave the way for the UX professionals we see today.

I did consider the timing for a moment before posting, and I don't mean to belittle the work they did; but we're talking late 90s, and a hugely popular and well-funded business, not a dot-com startup in early '95. You'd expect the relatively few active usability specialists at the time to be within their reach, had it not been for the cultural obstacles.

> Since they were run by engineers, they made their ads text.

As much a I like to think "us engineers" are smarter, that's still a pure business decision. Just a better one.

Neither short-sightedness nor vision are the exclusive domain of suits or engineers.

Ah, Lycos, Infoseek, AltaVista. I miss searching you all in separate Internet Explorer 4 windows on my Pentium MMX.

Here in the distant future I can just speak to my handheld supercomputer and it shows me exactly what I want.

I always thought Hotbot was the best for geeks. I do miss AltaVista though.

It was hotbot or webcrawler for me. And, yes, Altavista will always be remembered, especially for babelfish.

Oh man - until you said that I had entirely forgotten that there were once programs that did nothing but query the menagerie of search engines out there and show you a page of results so you could pray that one of them was what you wanted and open them all in your separate web browser of choice.

Not-so-good-old-days indeed.

I used Copernicus for that.

You likely mean Copernic, the big competitor to Google Desktop Search.

Oh wow, blast from the past. That thing still exists?

Dogpile FTW.

They taught us about Dogpile in school.

Dogpile taught me one thing: every result I liked always came from Google.

Goodbye Dogpile.

"Here in the distant future I can just speak to my handheld supercomputer and it shows me exactly what I want."

You've got a Nexus One too? ;-)

Considering I figured they'd died shortly after the bust, 36M doesn't sound that bad to me.

My first thought was "Woah, Lycos was still around?".

Yeah I'm not sure where the value is. The hope of converting traffic?

I can name a dozen startups that would be better $36M investments.

I'm not sure where the value is

According to the OP they seem to think it's in the brand name, which is pretty bizarre - how much brand recognition can Lycos have? Last time I can remember using Lycos, something like only 1% of people were on the Internet, and at least some of us must have died since then :-)

If they relaunched it I might use it for retro charm.

So, who profited in 1999 when Lycos was sold for $5+B? Some quick Googling didn't result in any answers.

It was sold for $12.5 billion (in stock) to Terra Networks (Telefonica) in May 2000

(Telefonica stock is worth more now than it used to in 2000)

So it looks like Lycos investors made a brilliant move.

The way it looks now, you could easily mistake it for one of those spammy search pages: http://www.lycos.com/

Complete with pixelated images in the news ticker

...and Google Analytics bug. Ha.

"The quality of content and tools offered by Lycos has always attracted the best of the consumers across the world."

Seriously? Like what?

We all thought it was dead, but it's still ranked 194th by compete.com, with over 6 million uniques per month.

It's telling that the kind of job Lycos is offering is an Associate to Senior Level Software Engineer in Web Publishing, and that trying to apply for this position (their "corporate culture" swayed me...) takes me to a Recruit Wizard.

I visited their office recently. It is like visiting a living history museum of the dot-com boom. Their business plan called for more of the same served in classic web 1.0 style, and they seemed rather proud of it too.

Wow, I had no idea Daum was the owner. Daum is huge in S. Korea.

This is why Lycos was able to survive on life support for so long. Seems Daum thought they were buying a prestige brand in US after Lycos star was already dimmed. A classic example of a distant parent not understanding the local trends.

Interesting. I was going to post earlier that I had a hunch Lycos was big is S. Korea after the main character in "My Sassy Girl" (2001) is seen using Lycos for his email. I figured that since it was 2001 it might not be the case anymore, but maybe it still is big out there.

I have a feeling that must have been some kind of product placement. I've rarely seen anybody in Korea not on Daum or Naver.

At least they did better than Lycos Europe which liquidated last year.

Give those "just" $36M to me. Thx.

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