Lycos Europe was founded in 1997 when Lycos signed a joint venture agreement with German group Bertelsmann. Two years later (1999) they opened branches in several cities. In Spain, a delegation was opened that was run by Oscar Sanchez for 4 years, now General Manager for Tech Sales Group. Bertelsmann group was the content leader in Europe after merging with Lycos - one out of 3 Europeans was a Lycos Europe user. They were overwhelmingly successful and it went public at 24€. In May 2000, Lycos is bought by Terra Networks (Telefonica) for $12500. They start buying strategically in Europe. They buy, among others, Swedish ISP Tiscali for 13 million Euros in August 2004, or Spray Network (8 portals in European countries) for 674 million Euros in September 2000, increasing the number of registered users to 8.5 million and 19 million visited pages. Those were years of incredible success, but the dotcom crisis and bad management brought about its debacle. At the beginning of 2004, Lycos lays off 100 workers in Europe, leaving 825. In 2005 half of the Spanish staff is laid off. They also offered them to move to other countries, especially Germany. On the other hand, 34 IT people in France (out of ...

I decided to write about Altavista after being contacted by a Failbeta reader, Oliver. In reality, as I mentioned to him, perhaps it is necessary to talk about various search engines which have fallen by the wayside due to the success of the absolute leader, Google. We'll leave that for later articles. Let's take a look at the history of this search engine, which was once the largest and most used in the world. Altavista was created by Louis Monier and Michael Burrows of the company Digital in December 1995. Monier would later work for Google until August 2007, when he left to create the new search engine Cuil. As for Burrows, he later worked for Microsoft and currently works for Google. Google's success caused an amazing influx of talent from its competitors. Altavista was hugely successful from the start. It went from receiving 300,000 hits on its first days to 80 million hits a day two years later. In 1996 it became the search provider for Yahoo! and two years later, in 1998, it was bought by Compaq. It was then later bought by Overture in 2003, and this company was in turn bought by Yahoo!. Remarkable. If we look back a ...