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Comment by jgilliam | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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."

> 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.

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.

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