Lycos is a perfect example of an internet company that failed because it was run by sales people and not engineers.
I was a software developer there in the late 90's, and we did some of the first eye-tracking studies on how people used the search engine. What we learned was shocking - no one looked at the flashy ads. The more we tried to make them stand out, the more they looked at the boring text in the middle of the page.
Clearly, the solution was non-flashy ads. Except, that's not what advertisers wanted, and Lycos did whatever advertisers wanted.
I'm sure Google did those same studies when they were working on their ads and saw the same thing. Since they were run by engineers, they made their ads text.
I think the flashiness would not have mattered so much if Lycos's results had been better. If I recall, the search results I got from Lycos were poorer than WebCrawler or Alta Vista. There wasn't that much difference, though--every search engine's results were filled with spammy crap. Yahoo, Lycos, Excite etc. decided to attack the spam problem with brute force by creating human-edited portals.
When Google appeared on my radar in late 1999/early 2000, it was a revelation. For the first time in many years, I could enter a search term and have a 75% chance of success compared to sub-50% rate of other search engines. The gap in effectiveness was too large for any other search engine to bridge.
(This also sort-of explains why Bing will have a hard time unseating Google. Google has improved to about 95% accuracy for me. Even if Bing gets to 99.9% accuracy, I probably wouldn't notice the difference.)
The reason the results were lousy was due to the sales culture. Sales people needed more pages to put banner ads on, so all our efforts went to building a "portal" -- not to improving search. The last thing Lycos wanted was for people to find something somewhere else on the internet.
What a great example of killing the golden goose. "Yes, I spent a full minute clicking through your results to find what I needed. You showed me 3 more ads than normal, and now I'll never, ever, return."
However your point would seem to reinforce the parent's point: Lycos chose to attack the problem with $$$ ("brute force by creating human-edited portals"), not engineering (better search algorithms; maybe more properly called CS, but you get the idea).
You may be right, you probably are. But stubbornly refusing to give your paying customers what they are willing to pay for is not some magical property of engineers.
> I was a software developer there in the late 90's, and we did some of the first eye-tracking studies on how people used the search engine.
I also find it telling that they let developers / engineers do eye tracking and user research, as opposed to designers / usability people.
> I'm sure Google did those same studies when they were working on their ads and saw the same thing. Since they were run by engineers, they made their ads text.
Google's data-centricism and engineering-informed design decisions have seen much pushback lately, as exemplified by the departure of lead designer Douglas Bowman:
There were very few UI designers at the time and almost no usability people on the web at all. The fact that they were doing these studies at all is something to be lauded and helped pave the way for the UX professionals we see today.
I did consider the timing for a moment before posting, and I don't mean to belittle the work they did; but we're talking late 90s, and a hugely popular and well-funded business, not a dot-com startup in early '95. You'd expect the relatively few active usability specialists at the time to be within their reach, had it not been for the cultural obstacles.
Oh man - until you said that I had entirely forgotten that there were once programs that did nothing but query the menagerie of search engines out there and show you a page of results so you could pray that one of them was what you wanted and open them all in your separate web browser of choice.
According to the OP they seem to think it's in the brand name, which is pretty bizarre - how much brand recognition can Lycos have? Last time I can remember using Lycos, something like only 1% of people were on the Internet, and at least some of us must have died since then :-)
It's telling that the kind of job Lycos is offering is an Associate to Senior Level Software Engineer in Web Publishing, and that trying to apply for this position (their "corporate culture" swayed me...) takes me to a Recruit Wizard.
I visited their office recently. It is like visiting a living history museum of the dot-com boom. Their business plan called for more of the same served in classic web 1.0 style, and they seemed rather proud of it too.
Interesting. I was going to post earlier that I had a hunch Lycos was big is S. Korea after the main character in "My Sassy Girl" (2001) is seen using Lycos for his email. I figured that since it was 2001 it might not be the case anymore, but maybe it still is big out there.
This is why Lycos was able to survive on life support for so long. Seems Daum thought they were buying a prestige brand in US after Lycos star was already dimmed. A classic example of a distant parent not understanding the local trends.
I was a software developer there in the late 90's, and we did some of the first eye-tracking studies on how people used the search engine. What we learned was shocking - no one looked at the flashy ads. The more we tried to make them stand out, the more they looked at the boring text in the middle of the page.
Clearly, the solution was non-flashy ads. Except, that's not what advertisers wanted, and Lycos did whatever advertisers wanted.
I'm sure Google did those same studies when they were working on their ads and saw the same thing. Since they were run by engineers, they made their ads text.
The rest is history.