Lycos was acquired for the princely sum of $5.4 billion at the peak of the dot-com bubble. It was "flipped" less than 4 years later for $94 million, and then sold again about 2 years ago for $36 million, after spinning off various non-core components like Wired News. It seems like they might have stabilized after simplifying and focusing their business, they seem to have low overhead costs, a small employee footprint and decent revenues in the $25 mil/year range.

With the latest round of changes it seems that they might be able to stick around indefinitely. I wonder what it must be like to work at a company that is so diminished from it's hey day.

Edit: Holy crap.

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I completely forgot about excite

it looks like altavista is still up, too

What Paul Graham realized (after Yahoo neglected search and paid a huge price) and Yahoo didn't is that people searching are looking for answers; and people looking for answers often pay real money to have their problems solved. That's why Google makes more than (say) Facebook.

The point is - search is a gold mine. The first tier (Google) is a mint. The second tiers (Yahoo, Bing, Baidu, Yandex) do well, unless they are weighed down with unprofitable divisions, or bad business decisions. Even a third tier search provider can make enough to be very viable. Third tier social networks? Even without the network effect, I wouldn't want to be there.

First, you seem to think that search is a "gold mine". This is completely wrong. Ads are gold mine, but nobody is making much money off of search. Nobody is looking to "pay real money" to have their search queries answered.

Second, you seem to think that Bing is making money. They're not; the most recently available figures show them burning a billion dollars a quarter. That's not doing "well" in most people's books.

Third, a couple of minor points: DDG has their own crawler, and doesn't just repackage Bing's results. On the other hand, Yahoo does just repackage Bing's results, and is shutting down their crawler. I'm not sure why that makes Yahoo "second tier" but DDG a "weird niche search engine". :)

Edit: I see now that I misinterpreted the parent. I thought he meant those just happened to be the top Lycos search terms, but he meant that the name of the form element was shared with other sites that have search fields I use.

The parent company also owns dogpile.com which now does the same search.

EDIT: Maybe not ... http://siteanalytics.compete.com/lycos.com/

From Wikipedia: As part of a corporate restructuring to focus on mobile, social networks and location-based serves, Daum sold Lycos for $36 million in August 2010 to Ybrant Digital, an internet marketing company based in Hyderabad, India.

Still gets 14 mil uniques (!): http://siteanalytics.compete.com/lycos.com/

This was my go-to search engine before I knew that URLs could be saved and loaded in another place to the same effect.

http://hotbot.com/

http://www.altavista.com/

ouch

First search engine I ever used. In high school Spanish class, about 1995. Still there! But, no more cool illustration of a spider.

I wonder who their demographic is. What type of person still uses dogpile or lycos? Is it hardcoded somewhere?

Still around, kinda.