Lycos: Bought For $5.4B, Sold For $36M

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Lycos (remember them?), bought for $5.4 billion way back in 2000, sold today for $36 million in stock purchase agreement.

Lycos, the ill-fated operator of a search engine, Web portal and whatnot originally established in 1994 (!) has a new owner – once again. India-based digital marketing solutions company Ybrant Digital has purchased Lycos from Korean Internet company Daum for a reported $36 million in a stock purchase agreement.
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Definitely wasn't even worth 5.4 billion in 2000 as that was the year I discovered google and immediately saw its greatness compared to the rest of the search engines.
 
wow never realized the amount of domains under Lycos' control back in the late 90's. Sure they were mostly laughable by todays standards, but in 1997, angelfire was still a pretty popular domain.
 
I think Lycos was the place I made my first throw away email address. I kind of forgot about them until seeing this headline.
 
I used to use Lycos. Anybody remember altavista too? Google came though and somehow they just seemed to find what I was looking for better.

Kind of funny to think back to the days that I was telling other people 'Try Google, it's like Yahoo but with better results.' and nobody knew what Google was except us internet enthusiasts.
 
Lycos was the only web-based email I could get to through Websense at my old job, back in like 2001. Stuck with 'em ever since. Hopefully this won't affect much.
 
i get a laugh out of this - i actually still use their web email over 10 years later!

less popular web email = less spam and i likes that just fine:)
 
Wow, some investment that turned out to be. Almost as bad as the Detroit Lions' old stadium (Pontiac Silverdome), which was constructed for over $55 million ($220 million in today's dollars) and sold 30 years later for less than $600k. :eek:
 
Ualdayan said:
I used to use Lycos. Anybody remember altavista too? Google came though and somehow they just seemed to find what I was looking for better.

Kind of funny to think back to the days that I was telling other people 'Try Google, it's like Yahoo but with better results.' and nobody knew what Google was except us internet enthusiasts.
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Altavista's still around. I liked how you could search for images/videos/sound etc. back in the day and never understood why that didn't catch on. Must've been the search relevance like you said.
 
Daum didn't pay $5.4 Billion however, they paid $95.4 million when they got it from Terra. A loss is a loss however.
 
I have had two lycos emails for a long time. I too hope they don't shut that down anytime soon.
 
beowulf7 said:
Wow, some investment that turned out to be. Almost as bad as the Detroit Lions' old stadium (Pontiac Silverdome), which was constructed for over $55 million ($220 million in today's dollars) and sold 30 years later for less than $600k. :eek:
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Any investment into Detroit is a bad investment. :p
 
Lycos Top 50 was awesome. I remember watching Pokemon and Dragonball Z battle for 1st place.
 
Lycos brings back memories...sigh!

Didn't know they still existed, gotta check it out.
 
$5.4B, that was one of those ludicrous tech bubble buys.

I preferred Alta Vista before Google came out.
 
Ya I was a AltaVista user as well. Then Google came out and my reaction ...... "WTF is Google?? Thats the dumbest name ev........... wow it rocks"
 
i remember altavista back in 96 or 97, then in 99 i found dogpile, THEN google took over hardcore... never go anywhere since. all other search engines look horrid to me
 
eh, remember, this happened at the time of the internet boom. aol is only the one you hear most about. pretty much any company that bought internet startups mostly lost all their investment.
 
Wow, I forgot about Lycos... I did not know they were still around. I used Hotbot and Tripod for the longest time before I came across Google.
 
Atl530i said:
Wow, I forgot about Lycos... I did not know they were still around. I used Hotbot and Tripod for the longest time before I came across Google.
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No edit :( I used Tripod before Lycos took over. I guess that's why I stopped using Tripod.

Geocities FTW!!!
 
Parmenides said:
Any investment into Detroit is a bad investment. :p
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Yeah, no doubt that the stadium sold so cheaply b/c it's in Detroit. If the Chargers sold their stadium in San Diego, no way in hell it'd sell for less than a penny on the dollar.

But it's not like Detroit is Kandahar or Kabul, right? Well, not yet, but sadly, it's going in that direction from what I've read. :(
 
I used Yahoo mostly until one day I saw a "Powered by Google" link on the Yahoo page and clicked it. I decided to just go directly to the source.
 
Lycos was the "best" internet search engine back in the early days. I say "best" because it was better than most, but not good enough to be a stand-alone solution. So, I would often use the World Wide Web Worm or AltaVista if Lycos left me hanging.

And then I discovered Yahoo, and all other search engines became redundant. Yahoo was the first time that I got results so good that I stopped using other engines.

And then, Yahoo went downhill, and I discovered Google. So far, they've kept-up the quality, and I have yet to stray.
 
Do they really think they're going to recover those $36M soon? hell I can say they will never see that money again. In 2 years the price will be 15M for the next group of suckers.
 
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