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).
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.)