Show HN: Holy shit Lycos still exists | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Holy shit Lycos still exists

lycos.com

48 pointszbruhnke33 comments

To add some seriousness to this very unserious and "fluffy" submission:

Lycos was acquired for the princely sum of $5.4 billion at the peak of the dot-com bubble. It was "flipped" less than 4 years later for $94 million, and then sold again about 2 years ago for $36 million, after spinning off various non-core components like Wired News. It seems like they might have stabilized after simplifying and focusing their business, they seem to have low overhead costs, a small employee footprint and decent revenues in the $25 mil/year range.

With the latest round of changes it seems that they might be able to stick around indefinitely. I wonder what it must be like to work at a company that is so diminished from it's hey day.

At least it's looking better than Excite. http://excite.com/

Edit: Holy crap.

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haha

I completely forgot about excite

it looks like altavista is still up, too

There's some weird niche search engine called duck-duck-go which also stays viable. If you don't want to make $billions, you can use yahoo/bings search api, and roll a nice niche search engine. You won't kill google, but taking even a tiny fraction of their profits is still pretty good.

What Paul Graham realized (after Yahoo neglected search and paid a huge price) and Yahoo didn't is that people searching are looking for answers; and people looking for answers often pay real money to have their problems solved. That's why Google makes more than (say) Facebook.

The point is - search is a gold mine. The first tier (Google) is a mint. The second tiers (Yahoo, Bing, Baidu, Yandex) do well, unless they are weighed down with unprofitable divisions, or bad business decisions. Even a third tier search provider can make enough to be very viable. Third tier social networks? Even without the network effect, I wouldn't want to be there.

Uh...

First, you seem to think that search is a "gold mine". This is completely wrong. Ads are gold mine, but nobody is making much money off of search. Nobody is looking to "pay real money" to have their search queries answered.

Second, you seem to think that Bing is making money. They're not; the most recently available figures show them burning a billion dollars a quarter. That's not doing "well" in most people's books.

Third, a couple of minor points: DDG has their own crawler, and doesn't just repackage Bing's results. On the other hand, Yahoo does just repackage Bing's results, and is shutting down their crawler. I'm not sure why that makes Yahoo "second tier" but DDG a "weird niche search engine". :)

Yeah, they actually spent $20+ Million dollars buying "Sonique" A simple MP3 player that you installed on your desktop, kind of like Winamp only without all the features. It was a beautiful player but after a decade or so they completely shut down the whole thing, it had hundreds of plugins and visualizations. It was the most beautiful mp3 player ever but still, just an mp3 player. $20 million. Yeah. That will forever be the defining moment in the dot-com-bubble for me.

Without typing anything in the search box, hit down arrow to get a list of suggested searches. My personalization was extremely spot on given that I haven't used Lycos in 10 years.

I think that's just random auto-complete noise caused by the fact that their search input uses a fairly common name.

No, it was creepily relevant for me too. It seems to know what I've been typing into Github over the past 24 hours.

Would the downvoters kindly explain themselves? I intended to pose an honest question about how they're doing autocomplete. Apparently I'm the only one who hasn't seen that particular behavior on a search engine before. I don't recall that specific set of suggestions show up in any other search box I've used, probably because I don't pay attention.

Edit: I see now that I misinterpreted the parent. I thought he meant those just happened to be the top Lycos search terms, but he meant that the name of the form element was shared with other sites that have search fields I use.

I don't think you understand. Try using it in incognito mode. It even works there. Try clearing your browser form history. Now it doesn't.

You're right, I completely misread the grandparent.

That's the browser's autocomplete, probably triggered by the field being named 'q'. It tracks what you've entered into other fields (I assume named 'q'), hence I get lots of testing data from my current project's search field.

I wonder what the source is. It had access to a lot of keywords for which I searched on my company's internal code search system.

Other forms you've filled out in your browser with an <input name="q">

Prior to Google, I used to use MetaCrawler (http://www.metacrawler.com), which also still exists, and now simultaneously searches Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

The parent company also owns dogpile.com which now does the same search.

And now that this post has made it to the front page we will likely single handedly increase their monthly page views by a few hundred percent lol

EDIT: Maybe not ... http://siteanalytics.compete.com/lycos.com/

The amazing part is it looks like a real Web 2.0ey kind of site.

Very Metro-y, I wonder when this redesign went live.

looking at http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/lycos.com , within the past 6 months spurred by a buyout from an Indian company.

From Wikipedia: As part of a corporate restructuring to focus on mobile, social networks and location-based serves, Daum sold Lycos for $36 million in August 2010 to Ybrant Digital, an internet marketing company based in Hyderabad, India.

Still gets 14 mil uniques (!): http://siteanalytics.compete.com/lycos.com/

Also http://www.metacrawler.com/

This was my go-to search engine before I knew that URLs could be saved and loaded in another place to the same effect.

I have awesome and awful memories of using Lycos' Tripod as a web host back in its early days. That and Expages were what got me hooked on web development as a kid.

Yup, I remember those days, at members.tripod.com ;)

Also still around:

http://hotbot.com/

http://www.altavista.com/

I think I still have Altavista bookmarked as http://altavista.digital.com somewhere...

ouch

http://www.webcrawler.com/

First search engine I ever used. In high school Spanish class, about 1995. Still there! But, no more cool illustration of a spider.

http://www.dogpile.com/ is still out there too.

I wonder who their demographic is. What type of person still uses dogpile or lycos? Is it hardcoded somewhere?

and its a completely fluid design

Some trivia that not too many people know. Lycos almost bought Viaweb but backed away because of some potential ip issues with one of the viaweb employees.

... and has a touch-optimized Metro-like look, real-time size adjustment.

infoseek.com appears to redirect to go.com

Still around, kinda.

so does http://www.mamma.com/ . I used to use this after Yahoo and before Google.

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