Lycos
More info
- Creator
- Michael Mauldin
- Released
- 1994
- Type
- Search engine, web portal
Carnegie Mellon search engine that grew into one of the big 1990s web portals and then a textbook case of dot-com valuation.
Michael Mauldin built Lycos in 1994 as a research project; the name comes from Lycosidae, the wolf spiders, which hunt instead of spinning webs. It became a company the next year and, like most search engines of the era, grew into a portal with news, email and the free hosting services Tripod and Angelfire.
Spain's Terra Networks bought Lycos in 2000 for $12.5 billion, right at the top of the bubble. Four years later it was sold on to South Korea's Daum for roughly a hundredth of that. By then Google had already made the portal model look dated.