WhereIsAtlas · Tech
Lycos
One of the internet's first big search engines, born at Carnegie Mellon — now a minor portal owned in India
Transformed — Lycos was one of the first great search engines, built at Carnegie Mellon and a top destination of the 1990s web. It passed through several owners and, after being sold to India's Ybrant Digital in 2010, survives as a modest portal with a much smaller footprint.
Lycos was created in 1995 by Michael Mauldin at Carnegie Mellon University, who built a web-crawling search engine that could index far more of the growing web than its rivals. Named for a family of spiders, it became one of the most-visited sites on the internet and one of the defining names of the early search era.
It went public in 1996 and grew into a full internet portal with email, chat and web hosting, competing with names like Yahoo, Excite and AltaVista. For a generation of users, Lycos was an enormous part of daily internet life.
Lycos was acquired by Terra, at the time part of Spain's Telefónica, in 2000. After struggling through the dot-com bust, it was sold in 2010 to India's Ybrant Digital. It still exists as a search and portal property, but it is a distant echo of the giant it once was.
Quick facts
- Founded
- 1995, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
- The idea
- A crawler-based search engine
- Name from
- The spider family Lycosidae
- Peak
- One of the most-visited sites of the 1990s
- Owners
- Terra (2000), Ybrant Digital (2010)
- Now
- A minor search and portal property
Lineage — where the name went
A Carnegie Mellon research project that became a public company, then a Spanish, Korean, Indian and finally litigated asset — the brand outlasted every one of its owners.
- 1995 — Michael Loren Mauldin founded Lycos, Inc. (the research project itself began at Carnegie Mellon in May 1994)
- 1995 — Carnegie Mellon University spun off Lycos, Inc. (a university spin-off financed with roughly $2 million of CMGI venture capital)
- 1996 — Lycos, Inc. created The 1996 IPO (the first search engine to become a public company)
- 2000 — Terra Networks acquired Lycos, Inc. ($12.5 billion in stock, October 2000; the combined group was called Terra Lycos)
- 2004 — Terra Networks sold Daum Communications ($95.4 million in cash, under 2% of what Terra had paid)
- 2010 — Daum Communications sold Ybrant Digital ($36 million, of which the second instalment was disputed)
- 2018 — Ybrant Digital rebranded as Brightcom Group (the Indian parent took the Brightcom Group name in May 2018)
- 2014 — Daum Communications merged into Kakao (the Korean portal merged with Kakao, the company behind KakaoTalk)
- 2018 — Kakao acquired Lycos, Inc. (disputed: a New York court appointed Daum as receiver of Ybrant's 56% interest rather than as outright owner, so ownership of Lycos has been contested since the 2010 deal)
- Lycos, Inc. created Lycos.com (the portal brand outlasted every owner and is still running)
Entities in this tree: Michael Loren Mauldin (person); Carnegie Mellon University (company); Lycos, Inc. (company, 1995); The 1996 IPO (event, 1996); Terra Networks (company); Daum Communications (company); Ybrant Digital (company); Brightcom Group (company); Kakao (company); Lycos.com (brand)
Sources
- Lycos - Wikipedia — Wikipedia (2026-09-05)
- Lycos Sold For $36 Million — Search Engine Land (2026-09-05)
- Daum to merge with Kakao, creating 3 tln won IT giant — Yonhap News Agency (2026-09-20)
- Daum Global v. Ybrant, Memorandum and Order of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, 8 May 2018 — Jus Mundi (2026-09-20)