Talk:Lycos

Lycos and Lycos Europe
Note that "Lycos" and "Lycos Europe" are two different companies. The latter was a joint venture partner with Bertelsmann. (There were a number of other JVs, including Lycos Japan, Lycos Asia, etc. The Lycos US had a financial stake in these companies, but they were otherwise separate.) While the brand names are the same, the underlying sites aren't necessarily similar. For example, Lycos Europe has both Tripod and Angelfire sites... but they have very different features than their US counterparts.

We should remove information here pertaining just to Lycos Europe, since all the corporate history is wrong in that context. Instead, there should be a separate article if there is enough information.

In specific, Lycos US had nothing to do with the nifty screensaver. Sadly. JRP

Lycos was sold to Terra for $12.5 billion?? Lushsight 12:56, 11 July 2006 (UTC)


 * Ah, yes, the dotcom years. Well, at least they got $105 million dollars for their $12.5 billion dollar investment.  For me, this deserves a wikilink to Schadenfreude. Stev0 15:24, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

lycos.com inaccessible
See subj. As of date added and a few hours earlier. -Mardus 18:50, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

Same company?
Is Lycos in any way associated with http://geocities.com people? Merged?
 * Geocities is Yahoo. Tripod and Angelfire are Lycos' homepage providers. JRP 01:44, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Mail Stuff
Lycos mail now offers 3 gigabytes and "unlimited" file size attachments for its free email accounts.

Lycos 50
Is the Lycos 50 notable enough to mention in this article? --Galaxiaad 10:16, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Advert?
I disagree with User:Feezo's tag. The article contains plenty of damning information (that it was sold to Daum for < 1% of its purchase price by Terra, for example). Of course, the article could be augmented and improved in many ways, but I don't think it needs to be tagged as an ad. --Macrakis 20:37, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

I also agree that the should be removed. I see no blatent advertising at all! Ukmonkey 19:31, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Well, since Feezo hasn't defended his tag here, I am removing it. --Macrakis 19:35, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Circular Link
The Lycos Mail link is a redicect to Lycos is there any method in this madness? Thomashauk 21:32, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

Neutrality
This article cites each and every good thing about Lycos (regardless how trivial), and does not provide a single negative fact. The lycos.com was one of the top three search engines along with Altavista and Yahoo in the mid 90s. Now it is a subsidiary of "the 2nd largest Internet portal in Korea" (No pun intended). The process of falling down from a global leader position to "2nd largest of Korea"'s subsidiary should not be without thorns. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 144.122.13.187 (talk) 09:25, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

i agree, this article is ridiculous —Preceding unsigned comment added by SquallLeonhart ITA (talk • contribs) 15:20, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

The newly added section should appeal to neutrality. it needs cleanup and proper reference tags.

The advert section of this page discusses a removal of a previous advert tag. However, the participants in this section argue that the article is plain one-sided. Hence I added the advert tag again.--Eleman (talk) 12:12, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Also see the wikiscanner section.--Eleman (talk) 12:13, 15 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Eleman, the wikiscanner is really old and Lycos Europe is not part of Lycos, despite what the name suggests. I've trolled this page to try and keep it neutral (see my user page; I'm a Lycos employee but I also care deeply about wikipedia and have a number of featured articles under my belt). If there's a change that you'd like made to remove the advert tag, let me know. (Unless you don't trust me to make it, which is fair.) JRP (talk) 13:04, 15 October 2008 (UTC)


 * A short paragraph about the 2000-2004 period, explaining why the value of the company collapsed and the reasons of the decline in the market share of Lycos, placed before the fifth paragraph in Corporate Development part would do the trick I guess. Without such an explanation the article seems like a naive glass-half-full one.--Eleman (talk) 13:30, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Historical Footnote
Not that anyone probably cares, but I worked with Dr. Mauldin in Carnegie Mellon's Center for Machine Translation (the department where he had his office) from summer 1993 until I graduated in summer 1994, as a student programmer. We worked on a project called SCOUT which was basically a search engine for newsgroup feeds (which were at the time the largest source of content on the Internet, as the web hadn't really taken off yet). Dr. Mauldin was always back in his office working on his own stuff and myself and my fellow student programmer on the team (King-Sun Wai) wondered what he could be up to. Shortly before I graduated in May 1994 he brought me back to his office and showed me what he had been working on - a "web bot" as they were called back in the day - basically a spider that crawled the web and gathered pages to index into a search engine. A few weeks later he told me he had thought of a name - Lycos. As I was graduating he offered me a job to stay on and work with him at CMU as a junior programmer on his team but I declined, preferring instead to head out to silicon valley where I thought my prospects were better. Had I accepted his offer I would have been one of the first employees of Lycos. I suppose I will never come closer to being a millionaire than that, and I missed my chance. Dr. Mauldin was a very nice, intelligent, and thoughtful person and I am glad that he had the success that he did. I will always remember how he would say "a binary order of magnitude" when he meant 2x something (like, "that algorithmic improvement is only going to gain you a binary order of magnitude"). For what it's worth, the first versions of Lycos were developed on a NeXT cube, I am not sure the model, but that's what Dr. Mauldin had in his office. - Bryan Ischo 118.90.14.253 (talk) 02:02, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Wikiscanner
Wikiscanner indicates that this page is being edited from Lycos-Europe-Office-It, among other Lycos locations. Edits should be watched. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.41.156.63 (talk) 15:54, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Probably the reason for the neutrality issues mentioned above Thomashauk (talk) 23:16, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

Pronunciation?
How is Lycos pronounced? With /i:/ or with /ai/? --93.86.153.93 (talk) 19:39, 10 December 2008 (UTC)
 * /ai/, as if it were written lie koss. Though, pedantically speaking, as the word is from the Greek λυκος (wolf), the Upsilon (y) should really be pronounced like a German U-umlaut (Ü), a very narrow "oo" sound
 * Nuttyskin (talk) 12:46, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

Lycos Mail
Moved this from the main page:
 * As of Sunday May 31st, 2009, free lycos email account holders were frozen out of their email accounts. When they tried to log in, they were shown a page which instructed them to upgrade to a $19.95 pay account. This came without warning and left concerned account subscribers wondering how they would access important emails and information.

I removed this only because it is inaccurate. There is a problem that some Lycos Mail users are reporting which is causing this to happen, but it is a bug and not a deliberate change. I'm working with the team at Lycos to get this resolved now. JRP (talk) 04:10, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Problem is resolved now for nearly all account, the remainder will be fixed within the next 30 minutes or so. JRP (talk) 04:58, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Merge proposal
I am proposing that Lycos Europe be merged into this article since it appears to no longer exist. The page as it is requires updating following the sales and closures the company announced in 2008 and 2009 and the main Lycos.com site links to all international variants of itself. Also Lycos Europe was a separate company, it would appear it no longer exists. I may be wrong and I'd be happy to be corrected :) Cloudbound (the new name for Wikiwoohoo) (talk) 15:27, 7 March 2010 (UTC)
 * I suspect this merge may be dead, but I can speak to some of the issues. Lycos Europe is closed/closing and Lycos (the US company) has purchased the relevant assets and domain names. That said, Lycos Europe was a distinct company for eleven years or so with a separate corporate history and ownership. My gut would be to prominently link to the Lycos article on the Lycos Europe article, explaining that Lycos in Europe is now run by the US company, but I would continue to keep their articles separate. (Disclaimer: As stated on my User page, I am a Lycos employee.) JRP (talk)
 * I think that's a good idea. I'll remove the merge tags. Cloudbound (talk) 19:24, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Lycos Tripod's free website hosting offer is false
For a long time, Lycos Tripod has advertised free website hosting. When one signs up with Lycos Tripod for a website the company offers several options, including free service. Yet, when requesting a free website the particular program does not respond.

Lycos Tripod has been informed of the problem many times in the past year, yet the problem remains.

According to government regulators in Washington, D. C., Lycos is guilty of false advertising and is in violation of numerous regulations. User talk:applicant


 * None of this is true and I'm considering just deleting this comment, except for the conflict of interest that I have in the situation (as an employee of Lycos). Someone else please feel free to delete it. Tripod still offers free webhosting and hundreds of people sign up for it daily, so that part of the comment is false. As for the regulators, I'm not aware of any issues in that respect either. If the user wants to leave me a message on my talk page about his or her not being able to sign up for a Tripod account, I would be happy to assist. JRP (talk)


 * The above comment, from JRP, is from some guy who claims to work for Lycos in Massachusetts. He might be a crank. Or he might really be working for Lycos. If so, he is a professional liar and hopes to score points with his superiors. Indeed, Lycos' offer of free website hosting is false. All one need do to confirm the fact is to try to sign up for a free website. The service does not work. Instead of getting the free website, the applicant is asked to contact the local server to arrange payment. Look for another way to kiss ass, JRP. And if you hack this comment I'll hack your stuff. User:AASWK


 * At Lycos employees work only for the paycheck. I alerted the company to dozens of problems over the years and not a thing was corrected. And the excuses were absurd. Some employees are there to receive illicit payments from outside the company to do things they shouldn't. That has annoyed users and, ultimately, created more problems for the company. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Inspectorgeneral333 (talk • contribs) 06:26, 16 January 2011 (UTC)


 * Wikipedia talk pages are not for general discussion of the topic. If you have some reliable sources for specific encyclopedic information (e.g. that Lycos has been found guilty of false advertising), please include it. If not, please discuss your complaints elsewhere. Thanks, --Macrakis (talk) 18:19, 16 January 2011 (UTC)


 * All one can see on this page is general discussion. It is true that the free website hosting that is advertised by Lycos Tripod does not work. Who are these idiots, JRP and Macrakis, who deny it? If Lycos is going down the drain it's because of employees like them. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Examiner2986 (talk • contribs) 12:03, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

Lycos case at WP:DRN
This message is being sent to let you know of a discussion at the Dispute resolution noticeboard regarding a content dispute discussion you may have participated in. Content disputes can hold up article development and make editing difficult for editors. You are not required to participate, but you are both invited and encouraged to help find a resolution. The thread is "Lycos". -- — Keithbob • Talk  • 01:28, 29 December 2013 (UTC)
 * This case has been closed as the allegations are that an editor's behavior is violating WP guidelines. This an issue for WP:ANI rather than WP:DRN which is for content discussions only. Thanks!-- — Keithbob • Talk  • 18:25, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

Still in business?
The site is showing serious instability as of 2/27/18, and has been down for at least a week. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Xeliff (talk • contribs) 18:41, 27 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Your personal observations are original research. If you can find an article in the press about this, it might be worth mentioning in the article if it's a frequent problem, but remember that WP is not a newspaper, so minor current issues are generally not worth mentioning. --Macrakis (talk) 22:48, 7 September 2020 (UTC)

No results for months
Whatever you search for, you get the "no results" message (since at least early 2018 from what I can remember). Is the "active" search engine status on Wikipedia still warranted? AlexBern73 (talk) 20:26, 8 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Searching on lycos.com works fine for me as of September 2020. --Macrakis (talk) 22:48, 7 September 2020 (UTC)