Lycos

User interfaces of some typical Internet search engines. The user may search by a selection of keywords in particular subject areas.

In computing, search engine for the World Wide Web. Lycos is a database compiled by Web crawlers that comb the Internet for Web, FTP, and Gopher sites, indexing them by title, headings, keywords, and text.

Lycos, named after a particularly voracious hunting spider, started as a research project at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA, but became a commercial venture in 1995. By August 1996 Lycos had indexed over 60 million URLs but has since fallen behind other search engines, such as Google, in reliability and speed. In 2000, a $12.5 billion offer was made for Lycos by Terra Networks, an Internet Service Provider, whose majority shareholder is Telefonica, the privatized Spanish national telecommunications operator.