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On June 19, the day Lycos Inc. split from Carnegie-Mellon University to become a commercial venture, the company employed one part-time professor - the creator of the Lycos search engine, Dr. Michael Mauldin.
Barely three months later, the Internet-catalog company received financial backing from the Internet venture capital firm @Ventures, employs 25 people and is gaining wider recognition for being chosen as the primary search service on the Microsoft Network.
On July 5, the number of visitors to the Lycos site was 6.4 million. By August, that number rose to 10 million users per month, and today it exceeds 20 million per month, according to statistics gathered at the Wilmington, Mass.-based company. This information is available on the Lycos home page, at http://www.lycos.com.
Not only does this reveal an accelerated interest in the Internet, it also indicates the necessity of employing such mechanisms for locating information and places on the World Wide Web. Similar search and directory tools from Yahoo Corp., Infoseek Corp. and others have become the road map of the virtual world, saving users from the frustration of wandering aimlessly on the Net.
Lycos recently redesigned its site with a more user-friendly search form and reformatted its search results page. Once knocked for being the slowest search service on the Net, Lycos has improved the performance by a factor of two to...