THE SEARCH ENGINES

Lycos began as a search engine research project by Dr. Michael Loren Mauldin of Carnegie Mellon University in 1994. Bob Davis joined the company as its CEO and first employee in 1995. Lycos then enjoyed several years of growth and, in 1999, became the most visited online destination in the world, with a global presence in more than 40 countries. Lycos was sold to Terra Networks of Spain in May 2000 for $5.4 billion, forming a new company Terra Lycos and maintaining a position as one of the world's largest Internet companies. Shortly after the merger, Davis left the company to become a venture capitalist with Highland Capital Partners in Boston. In October 2004, Lycos was sold by Terra's parent company Telefonica to Daum Communications Corporation, the second largest Internet portal in Korea, becoming once again Lycos Inc.



HotBot is one of the early Internet search engines and was launched in May 1996 as a service of Wired Magazine. It was launched using a "new links" strategy of marketing, claiming to update its search database more often than its competitors. It also offered free webpage hosting, but only for a short time, and it was taken down without any notice to its users. Though competitive when it was acquired by Lycos in 1998, HotBot has in recent years reduced its scope. Today the website is merely a front end for third-party search engines Yahoo.com, and MSN, as well as Lycos' own lyGo.com. It was one of the first search engines to offer the ability to search within search results. The site still exists, however it is run by Yahoo! mainly.

AltaVista was created by researchers at Digital Equipment Corporation's Western Research Laboratory who were trying to provide services to make finding files on the public network easier.^[1] Although there is some dispute about who was responsible for the original idea^[2], two key participants were Louis Monier, who wrote the crawler, and Michael Burrows, who wrote the indexer. The name AltaVista was chosen in relation to the surroundings of their company at Palo Alto. AltaVista was publicly launched as an internet search engine on 15 December 1995 at altavista.digital.com.^[3][4]

At launch, the service had two innovations which set it ahead of the other search engines. It used a fast, multi-threaded crawler (Scooter) which could cover a lot more Web pages than were believed to exist at the time and an efficient search back-end running on advanced hardware. As of 1998, it used 20 multi-processor machines using DEC's 64-bit Alpha processor. Together, the back-end machines had 130 GB of RAM, 500 GB of hard disk space, and received 13 million queries per day.^[5] This made AltaVista the first searchable, full-text database of a large part of the World Wide Web. The distinguishing feature of AltaVista was its minimalistic interface compared with other search engines of the time; a feature which was lost when it became a portal, but was regained when it refocused its efforts on its search function