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Search Engine Evolution: From Archie to Bing |
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Saturday, 13 June 2009 |
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Page 6 of 11
Lycos
Lycos, which started as a research project by Carnegie Mellon University scientist Michael Mauldin, added some key features to the search engine business by listing results in order of relevance and offering word proximity matching. But it was also notable for the size of its database. According to Mauldin, Lycos launched in July 1994 with 54,000 Web pages, a number that grew to 1.5 million by the end of the year. By late 1996, the site had indexed more than 60 million, giving it the largest database.
Lycos also lays claim to being the first search engine to go public, beating out Yahoo and Excite with a successful IPO in April 1996. The company was acquired in October 2000 by Spanish Web portal Terra Networks in a stock deal valued at $4.6 billion. When the deal was first announced, only six months earlier, it was valued at $12.5 billion. The dot-com bust had arrived.
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