Lycos is a web search engine and web portal established in 1994, spun out of Carnegie Mellon University. Lycos also encompasses a network of email, web hosting, social networking, and entertainment websites. The company is based in Waltham, Massachusetts, and is a subsidiary of Kakao.

Etymology

The word "Lycos" is short for "Lycosidae", which is Latin for "wolf spider".

History

Lycos is a university spin-off that began in May 1994 as a research project by Michael Loren Mauldin of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Lycos was formed with approximately USD 2 million in venture capital funding from CMGI. Bob Davis became the CEO and first employee of the new company in 1995 and concentrated on building the company into an advertisement-supported web portal, led by Bill Townsend, who served as Vice President, Advertising. Lycos enjoyed several years of growth during the 1990s and became the most visited online destination in the world in 1999, with a global presence in more than 40 countries.

In April 1996, the company completed the fastest initial public offering from inception to offering in NASDAQ (LCOS) history, ending its first day with a market value of $300 million. It also became the first search engine to go public, before its big rivals Yahoo! and Excite. In 1997, it became one of the first profitable internet businesses in the world. In 1998, Lycos acquired Tripod.com for $58 million in an attempt to "break into the portal market".

Lycos started offering email services in October 1997.

Near the peak of the dot-com bubble on May 16, 2000, Lycos announced its intent to be acquired by Terra Networks, the Internet arm of the Spanish telecommunications giant Telefonica, for $12.5 billion. The acquisition price represented a return of nearly 3000 times the company's initial venture capital investment and about 20 times its initial public offering valuation. The transaction closed in October 2000 and the merged company was renamed Terra Lycos, although the Lycos brand continued to be used in the United States. Overseas, the company continued to be known as Terra Networks.

Having been set back by the dot-com bubble burst, Lycos abandoned its own search crawler in late 2001 and started using FAST.

Lycos Network Sites

• Angelfire, a Lycos property that provides free web hosting, blogging, and web publishing tools.
• Tripod, a Lycos property providing free web hosting, blogging, and web publishing tools.
• Lycos Chat, a photo chatting community
• Lycos Domains, Internet domain name purchasing
• Lycos Mail, an email provider formerly known as Mailcity.com (As of 15 May 2018, providing only paid services)
• Lycos Weather
• Lycos Yellow Pages