WhereIsAtlas · Lycos
What Happened to Lycos?
A pioneer search engine of the 1990s, now a minor portal under Indian ownership.
Lycos was one of the first major web search engines, built at Carnegie Mellon and a top destination of the 1990s. After being sold to Ybrant Digital in 2010, it survives as a modest search and portal property.
A spider that found the web
Lycos was born in 1995, the work of Michael Mauldin at Carnegie Mellon University. Its search engine crawled the web automatically and indexed more pages than its rivals could, which made it one of the most useful places to find anything online. Its name came from the spider family Lycosidae, a nod to its web-crawling ways.
A giant of the 1990s internet
Lycos grew beyond search into a full portal, offering email, chat, homepages and news alongside its results. At its height it was one of the most visited places on the internet, competing with Yahoo, Excite and AltaVista for the attention of the 1990s web. For many, Lycos was simply what the internet looked like.
The long slide
Lycos was acquired in 2000 by Terra, then part of Spain's Telefónica, at the peak of the dot-com boom. The bubble's collapse hit the company hard, and in 2010 it was sold to India's Ybrant Digital for $36 million. The deal marked the end of Lycos as an independent force in search.
Where Lycos is now
Lycos still exists as a search and portal property, but it is a fraction of what it once was. Its audience is small, and its place in the internet's memory is largely nostalgic. It remains a curiosity of the early web — a reminder of the search engines that ruled before Google.
Entries in this story
Sources
- Lycos - Wikipedia — Wikipedia (2026-09-05)
- Lycos Sold For $36 Million — Search Engine Land (2026-09-05)