A LEADING INTERNET SEARCH ENGINE (1995-1997)
Lycos, Inc. was created in 1995 by CMG@ Ventures, which purchased the exclusive rights to Lycos Spider Technology from Carnegie Mellon University. Lycos was established as a subsidiary of CMG@Ventures, which later became CMGI Inc., to develop and market the technology. Lycos Spider Technology utilized software robots to scan the Internet and abstract the home pages that it found. Lycos built a catalog of more than 3.7 million Internet pages and had nearly 3.5 million hits a week. The name Lycos was derived from a Latin word for a special kind of spider that leaves its web to hunt.
Lycos went public in April 1996 and raised $40 million. It was one of four search engine companies that had their IPOs that year. Yahoo!, the best-known search engine, InfoSeek, and Excite.com also went public. Following their successful IPOs, other companies announced plans to go public or provide commercial searching products.
Throughout 1996 Lycos continued to upgrade its search engine by increasing its speed and making it possible to search for telephone numbers and e-mail addresses as well as individual sound, video, and other multimedia files. Lycos also added a city guide that featured 400 cities, and it established a Club Lycos for users that provided them with discounts with merchants. In addition Lycos redesigned its graphic interface to look like an Internet portal.
Lycos Europe was formed in May 1997 as a joint venture with German media conglomerate Bertels-mann AG. Later, when Lycos was acquired by Terra Networks in 2000, Bertelsmann pledged $1 billion to advertise and purchase services on Lycos. In the United States, Lycos signed a three-year agreement with Barnes & Noble that made BarnesandNoble.com the exclusive bookseller for Lycos. For fiscal 1997 ending July 31, Lycos had revenue of $22.3 million, up from $5.3 million in fiscal 1996.
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