Lycos gets snapped up by Ybrant Digital

Lycos, an early search engine company that gained prominence in the Internet bubble era, is in the headlines again this week as online-marketing company Ybrant Digital is going to buy the once-prominent Internet company for $36 million.

Since the heady Internet bubble days, Lycos has changed ownership a few times. Indian-based Ybrant Digital purchased Lycos from South Korean-based Daum Communications, which bought the Internet search company for a much higher price of $95 million in 2004.

Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) may be the dominant search engine provider today, but it's hard to forget Lycos' role as an early pioneer in  crawler-based search engines. At its peak, Lycos became one of the most popular Web search sites and was later acquired in 2000 by Spain's Terra Networks for $12.5 billion in stock--a price not unusual during the Internet bubble.  

With 60 million worldwide unique visitors a month, Ybrant thinks that Lycos has plenty of life left. "Our goal is to combine the benefits of Ybrant's global network with what Lycos has to offer in creating a compelling global destination for our advertising clients world-wide," said Ybrant CEO Suresh Reddy in Wall Street Journal article.

For more:
- Wall Street Journal has this story (sub. req.)

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