Terra Inks Google Deal; Values Lycos At $100 million

[Chris Sherman]

Dow Jones is reporting that Spanish online giant Terra has contracted with Google to provide search results to its properties.

The company is also in the process of selling Lycos, valuing it at about $100 million. Terra bought Lycos in 2000, for $12.5 billion, winning a bidding war that saw proposed offers for the search engine go as high as $18 billion.

[David Wallace]

Does anyone even use Lycos? I wonder what their percentage share of users is?

12.5 billion to .1 billion (100 million), huh? I'll stick to real estate myself as it doesn't devalue like that. Yikes!

[Rob]

Any idea who'd be in the market for Lycos? AOL possibly but would they have $$ after the Advertising.com deal?

[Joseph Morin]

Ask Jeeves just raised $400MM, speculation has been a bout that they might make a play for Lycos. According to Terra, there are currently four offers on the table right now for Lycos.

[Nacho]

Dow Jones is reporting that Spanish online giant Terra has contracted with Google to provide search results to its properties.

Whatever the price may be, I think this would be a great thing for Google if they decide to step up to the plate. Terra has a lot of knowledge and is high in the learning curve with the Hispanic (both US and Spain) and the Latin America users. Google would also gain even a bigger market share with this specific targeted audience. How they crawl the web and organize documents is very different than understanding how this market thinks and acts. Remember, these users are about 5-10 years behind (depending on each market (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=333)).

[MUSCLE13]

I'm interested to know. Does anybody here actually think that the big portals like Yahoo, MSN or even Google would be interested in a second tier player like Lycos? Why? Wouldn't a built up Lycos be cannabalizing the big portals traffic to begin with. Second tier seems like a fit with Jeeves to me.

[Webvisitor]

Google would also gain even a bigger market share with this specific targeted audience. How they crawl the web and organize documents is very different than understanding how this market thinks and acts. Remember, these users are about 5-10 years behind.

Interesting thought, one I had not considered. The popular theory seems to be that ASK will take Lycos but is ASK ready to make a Latin America move?
They might want it for other reasons.

We do know that Google will go shopping. Once Google buys one portal they will certainly buy more in addition to developing their own Gportal.

[MUSCLE13]

Interesting thought, one I had not considered. The popular theory seems to be that ASK will take Lycos but is ASK ready to make a Latin America move?
They might want it for other reasons.

We do know that Google will go shopping. Once Google buys one portal they will certainly buy more in addition to developing their own Gportal.

People, the only thing for sale here are Lycos US assets. Looks to me with Froogle, Google News, GMail, new Google Groups, Blogspot etc, Google is intent on building their own portal. I see a revitalized Lycos cannabalizing the traffic of Yahoo, MSN or Google since they all have their own generic portals. Where is the need? The fit is much better with Jeeves. Jeeves has iWon ( a sweepstakes portal) MyWay (an adfree portal), and Excite (a generic portal, but Infospace owns Excite search). A large generic portal with search like Lycos fits perfectly with Jeeves. It fills a need. To me Lycos doesn't make sense for the big boys.

[wiseMouse]

Lycos has two attractive things: a name and customers. Lycos is still a widely recognized brand, I'd say very well known. It's also got lots of customers, something Google - for example - works so hard to get. Only recently Google started to recognize how they can bind customers (blogger.com, gmail.com)...

P.S. who remembers the days Lycos was a crawler? :-)