Lycos
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Lycos, founded in 1994 as a Carnegie Mellon spinout, was one of the web's first search engines and portals: web search, email, web hosting and community sites. At its 1999 peak it ranked among the most visited sites on the internet; it never recovered after losing the search war to Google.
02 / Lycos FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Lycos lost the search war: its directory-and-portal model was out-executed by Google's superior relevance ranking, and the $12.5 billion Terra Networks buyout at the dot-com peak saddled it with an impossible valuation. After the crash, traffic and ad revenue collapsed; Terra sold it for $95.4 million in 2004 and Daum sold it on for $36 million in 2010 — over 99% of peak value destroyed in a decade.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Company founded
Lycos spins out of Carnegie Mellon University as one of the first web search engines.
- Acquisition
Terra Networks, Telefónica's internet arm, acquires Lycos for $12.5 billion at the peak of the dot-com bubble.
- Acquisition
Terra sells Lycos to South Korea's Daum Communications for $95.4 million, under 2% of what it paid.
- Acquisition
Daum sells Lycos to India's Ybrant Digital for $36 million.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Early search pioneer, CMU spinout 1994
- 02
$12.5B Terra buyout at the dot-com peak
- 03
Lost search to Google; portal model faded
- 04
Resold twice: $95.4M in 2004, $36M in 2010