Lycos
The wolf-spider-named search engine with the eager black Labrador that would 'Go Get It!' One of the first search giants — briefly bigger than Yahoo — and one of the great cautionary tales of the dot-com bubble.
Lycos began in May 1994 as a research project by Michael 'Fuzzy' Mauldin at Carnegie Mellon University, its name taken from Lycosidae, the wolf-spider family. It went public in April 1996 in what was then the fastest inception-to-IPO in NASDAQ history — the first search engine to reach the market, ahead of Yahoo! and Excite — closing its first day worth about $300 million.
Under CEO Bob Davis, Lycos spent the late '90s buying its way into a full-blown web portal, snapping up Tripod, the search engine HotBot (via Wired Digital), Angelfire, and the bingo site Gamesville. By April 1999 it reached 52% of all U.S. internet users — briefly more than Yahoo. The brand's public face became the eager black Labrador of its 1998 'Go Get It!' ad campaign, a $25-million blitz in which the dog fetched whatever you searched for.
At the very peak of the dot-com bubble, Spanish telecom Terra Networks bought Lycos for $12.5 billion in October 2000. The crash gutted that valuation almost immediately: in October 2004 Terra sold the entire company to South Korea's Daum Communications for $95.4 million — less than two percent of what it had paid four years earlier. Lycos still technically exists, passed between owners ever since, but its moment as a front page of the web belongs entirely to the '90s.
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