Lycos

Lycos is an Internet search engine and web directory. It was born from a research project by Dr. Michael Mauldin of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in 1994. The original Lycos search engine went on to be used in Carnegie Mellon's Informedia Digital Library project.

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The name "Lycos" is short for the Lycosidae, the wolf spiders, which actively hunt for their prey.

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Shortly after the development of the Lycos Search Engine, the Lycos company was formed using venture capital and initial internal support from CMU. The CEO of the Lycos company was Bob Davis, a native of Boston who moved the headquarters of Lycos to Waltham, Massachusetts from Pittsburgh, and concentrated on building it into an advertising-supported Web Portal, arguably at the expense of the Information Retrieval research on which the company was founded.

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Lycos Europe licensed the name, but has always been a distinct corporate entity, financially and operationally independent of Lycos. (Although Lycos Europe is the largest of the overseas ventures, several other companies also licensed the name, including Lycos Canada, Lycos Korea, and Lycos Singapore.)

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The Lycos company was purchased by Terra Networks, a subsidiary of the Spanish telephone company Telef?nica, in October 2000, and the merged company was renamed Terra Lycos in the United States. (Overseas, the company continued to be known as Terra Networks, S.A.)

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On August 2, 2004, Terra announced that was selling Lycos to Seoul, South Korea-based Daum Communications Corporation for $95.4 million in cash. In October 2004, the transaction closed, and the company name was changed back to Lycos, Inc. The remaining Terra half of the business was subsequently acquired by Telef?nica.

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Lycos suffered under competition from Google, which concentrated on driving its business primarily on the basis of fast, effective web search, but remains a viable business as of early 2005.

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Internet: This article is about the Internet, the extensive, worldwide computer network available to the public. An internet is a more general term informally used to describe any set of interconnected computer networks that are connected by internetworking....

Search engine: A search engine is a program designed to help find information stored on a computer system such as the World Wide Web, or a personal computer. The search engine allows one to ask for content meeting specific criteria (typically those containing a given word or phrase) and retrieves a list of referen...

Web directory: A web directory is a directory on the World Wide Web that specializes in linking to other web sites and categorizing those links. Web directories often allow site owners to submit their site for inclusion. Human editors review submissions for fitness....