Talk:Lycos

Lycos and Lycos Europe

Note that "Lycos" and "Lycos Europe" are two different companies. The latter was a joint venture partner with Bertelsmann. (There were a number of other JVs, including Lycos Japan, Lycos Asia, etc. The Lycos US had a financial stake in these companies, but they were otherwise separate.) While the brand names are the same, the underlying sites aren't necessarily similar. For example, Lycos Europe has both Tripod and Angelfire sites... but they have very different features than their US counterparts.

We should remove information here pertaining just to Lycos Europe, since all the corporate history is wrong in that context. Instead, there should be a separate article if there is enough information.

In specific, Lycos US had nothing to do with the nifty screensaver. Sadly. JRP

Lycos was sold to Terra for $12.5 billion?? Lushsight 12:56, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

Ah, yes, the dotcom years. Well, at least they got $105 million dollars for their $12.5 billion dollar investment. For me, this deserves a wikilink to Schadenfreude. Stev0 15:24, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

lycos.com inaccessible

See subj. As of date added and a few hours earlier. -Mardus 18:50, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

Same company?

Is Lycos in any way associated with http://geocities.com people? Merged?

Geocities is Yahoo. Tripod and Angelfire are Lycos' homepage providers. JRP 01:44, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Mail Stuff

Lycos mail now offers 3 gigabytes and "unlimited" file size attachments for its free email accounts.

Lycos 50

Is the Lycos 50 notable enough to mention in this article? --Galaxiaad 10:16, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Advert?

I disagree with User:Feezo's {{advert}} tag. The article contains plenty of damning information (that it was sold to Daum for < 1% of its purchase price by Terra, for example). Of course, the article could be augmented and improved in many ways, but I don't think it needs to be tagged as an ad. --Macrakis 20:37, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

I also agree that the {{advert}} should be removed. I see no blatent advertising at all! Ukmonkey 19:31, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Well, since Feezo hasn't defended his tag here, I am removing it. --Macrakis 19:35, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Circular Link

The Lycos Mail link is a redicect to Lycos is there any method in this madness? Thomashauk 21:32, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

Neutrality

This article cites each and every good thing about Lycos (regardless how trivial), and does not provide a single negative fact. The lycos.com was one of the top three search engines along with Altavista and Yahoo in the mid 90s. Now it is a subsidiary of "the 2nd largest Internet portal in Korea" (No pun intended). The process of falling down from a global leader position to "2nd largest of Korea"'s subsidiary should not be without thorns. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 144.122.13.187 (talk) 09:25, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

i agree, this article is ridiculous —Preceding unsigned comment added by SquallLeonhart ITA (talk • contribs) 15:20, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

The newly added section should appeal to neutrality. it needs cleanup and proper reference tags.

The advert section of this page discusses a removal of a previous advert tag. However, the participants in this section argue that the article is plain one-sided. Hence I added the advert tag again.--Eleman (talk) 12:12, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Also see the wikiscanner section.--Eleman (talk) 12:13, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Eleman, the wikiscanner is really old and Lycos Europe is not part of Lycos, despite what the name suggests. I've trolled this page to try and keep it neutral (see my user page; I'm a Lycos employee but I also care deeply about wikipedia and have a number of featured articles under my belt). If there's a change that you'd like made to remove the advert tag, let me know. (Unless you don't trust me to make it, which is fair.) JRP (talk) 13:04, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

A short paragraph about the 2000-2004 period, explaining why the value of the company collapsed and the reasons of the decline in the market share of Lycos, placed before the fifth paragraph in Corporate Development part would do the trick I guess. Without such an explanation the article seems like a naive glass-half-full one.--Eleman (talk) 13:30, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Historical Footnote

Not that anyone probably cares, but I worked with Dr. Mauldin in Carnegie Mellon's Center for Machine Translation (the department where he had his office) from summer 1993 until I graduated in summer 1994, as a student programmer. We worked on a project called SCOUT which was basically a search engine for newsgroup feeds (which were at the time the largest source of content on the Internet, as the web hadn't really taken off yet). Dr. Mauldin was always back in his office working on his own stuff and myself and my fellow student programmer on the team (King-Sun Wai) wondered what he could be up to. Shortly before I graduated in May 1994 he brought me back to his office and showed me what he had been working on - a "web bot" as they were called back in the day - basically a spider that crawled the web and gathered pages to index into a search engine. A few weeks later he told me he had thought of a name - Lycos. As I was graduating he offered me a job to stay on and work with him at CMU as a junior programmer on his team but I declined, preferring instead to head out to silicon valley where I thought my prospects were better. Had I accepted his offer I would have been one of the first employees of Lycos. I suppose I will never come closer to being a millionaire than that, and I missed my chance. Dr. Mauldin was a very nice, intelligent, and thoughtful person and I am glad that he had the success that he did. I will always remember how he would say "a binary order of magnitude" when he meant 2x something (like, "that algorithmic improvement is only going to gain you a binary order of magnitude"). For what it's worth, the first versions of Lycos were developed on a NeXT cube, I am not sure the model, but that's what Dr. Mauldin had in his office. - Bryan Ischo 118.90.14.253 (talk) 02:02, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Wikiscanner

Wikiscanner indicates that this page is being edited from Lycos-Europe-Office-It, among other Lycos locations. Edits should be watched. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.41.156.63 (talk) 15:54, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Probably the reason for the neutrality issues mentioned above Thomashauk (talk) 23:16, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

Pronunciation?

How is Lycos pronounced? With /i:/ or with /ai/? --93.86.153.93 (talk) 19:39, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

/ai/, as if it were written lie koss. Though, pedantically speaking, as the word is from the Greek λυκος (wolf), the Upsilon (y) should really be pronounced like a German U-umlaut (Ü), a very narrow "oo" sound

Nuttyskin (talk) 12:46, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

Lycos Mail

Moved this from the main page:

As of Sunday May 31st, 2009, free lycos email account holders were frozen out of their email accounts. When they tried to log in, they were shown a page which instructed them to upgrade to a $19.95 pay account. This came without warning and left concerned account subscribers wondering how they would access important emails and information.

I removed this only because it is inaccurate. There is a problem that some Lycos Mail users are reporting which is causing this to happen, but it is a bug and not a deliberate change. I'm working with the team at Lycos to get this resolved now. JRP (talk) 04:10, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

• Problem is resolved now for nearly all account, the remainder will be fixed within the next 30 minutes or so. JRP (talk) 04:58, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Merge proposal

I am proposing that Lycos Europe be merged into this article since it appears to no longer exist. The page as it is requires updating following the sales and closures the company announced in 2008 and 2009 and the main Lycos.com site links to all international variants of itself. Also Lycos Europe was a separate company, it would appear it no longer exists. I may be wrong and I'd be happy to be corrected :) Cloudbound _{(the new name for Wikiwoohoo)} (talk) 15:27, 7 March 2010 (UTC)

I suspect this merge may be dead, but I can speak to some of the issues. Lycos Europe is closed/closing and Lycos (the US company) has purchased the relevant assets and domain names. That said, Lycos Europe was a distinct company for eleven years or so with a separate corporate history and ownership. My gut would be to prominently link to the Lycos article on the Lycos Europe article, explaining that Lycos in Europe is now run by the US company, but I would continue to keep their articles separate. (Disclaimer: As stated on my User page, I am a Lycos employee.) 209.202.205.1 (talk) 19:45, 6 April 2010 (UTC)