A brief history of the Lycos and HotBot search engines.

Lycos was one of the earliest search engines, first developed in 1994 by Dr. Michael L. Mauldin and a team of researchers at the Carnegie Mellon University Center for Machine Translation. Lycos' name comes from the Latin name for the wolf spider that is a hunter, actively stalking their prey.

When Lycos was first launched on July 20, 1994 it had a catalog of 54,000 documents but less than a month later its crawler had recorded more than 390,000 documents in its index. By the start of 1995, Lycos had indexed 1.5 million documents, then growing rapidly to over 60 million documents by the end of 1996, making it the largest search engine at the time.

Carnegie Mellon licensed the Lycos technology to a newly created company founded by Mauldin and jointly backed by Carnegie Mellon and CMGI in June 1995 and the company went public the following year. In 1998 the company acquired Wired Digital, the owner of the HotBot search engine.

In May 2000, right at the peak of the dotcom bubble, Terra Networks, S.A., a major provider of Internet access to the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking world agreed to purchase Lycos for $12.5 billion in stock. Dr. Mauldin left Lycos in 1998, when the company developed as a portal network with many regional sites, offering chat services, personal home pages, horoscopes and other non-core features. As a result, Lycos' prominence as a search tool declined, but that changed again in December 1999, when Lycos reached an agreement to invest in FAST search technology. Soon FAST began powering Lycos advanced search results and by the autumn of 2001, Lycos abandoned its own crawler and began serving results exclusively from FAST.

Read more here:

• Terra Lycos Corporate Information
  
• Lycos Europe History

HotBot was launched in May 1996. It was owned and operated by Wired Magazine and became a popular tool with search results served by the Inktomi database and directory results provided originally by LookSmart and then The Open Directory since mid-1999. Hotbot also used search data from Direct Hit for a period, which was a tool that used click-through data to manipulate results.

The Lycos company acquired HotBot in 1998 and for a number of years this search tool has languished with limited development and falling market share. At the end of 2002 HotBot was relaunched as a multiple option search tool, giving users the option to search either the FAST, Google, Inktomi or Teoma databases.

Search the web from here with Hotbot:

 

How to get a high search engine ranking on Lycos and HotBot...

Learn more about the other main search engines: AltaVista, FAST, Google, Inktomi and Teoma.

To find out how your website can achieve a top ranking on Lycos, HotBot and the other top search engines, contact the web search workshop for more information or request a FREE site assessment to see how well your website currently performs.

 

Return to Materials introduction
The top web search engines
The top web directories
How the top search tools work together
Options for paid search listings
UK search engines and directories
Partnerships between UK search engines and directories
European search engines and directories
The future of web search tools