Lycos took its name from the wolf spider, a hunter that runs down its prey instead of waiting in a web. Michael Mauldin, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon, built the search engine in 1994 to do the same thing to web pages. A year later CMG, a Massachusetts direct-marketing company, bought the rights and turned it into a business. When Lycos went public in April 1996, the web was small enough to index on a few servers, and search was a land grab.

Out of Carnegie Mellon

Mauldin's crawler fetched pages, followed their links and built a catalog that users could search. Carnegie Mellon licensed the technology, and CMG's venture arm, CMG@Ventures, formed Lycos as a company in 1995 with Bob Davis as chief executive. Lycos made its money from banner ads on its search results. It soon added guides, directories and other features to keep visitors on its pages longer than a single search.

Twelve Billion Dollars, Then Less

Lycos sold 3 million shares at $16 each in April 1996 and traded on Nasdaq as LCOS. It grew into one of the busiest portals of the dot-com years by buying sites such as Tripod and Angelfire. In 2000 Terra Networks, the Spanish internet company, bought Lycos in a deal valued at about $12.5 billion. The bubble burst months later. Terra sold Lycos to South Korea's Daum in 2004 for a small fraction of that price.

Cover: Wolf, Jan van Os. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a wolf (the wolf spider, Lycosidae).