The Rats Nest Search Engine

Lycos has now full integrated the Open Directory Project (ODP) into its mainstream results pages. Certain categories of ODP sites pull extremely well from the Lycos version of the ODP. It is very wise to get your site properly listed in the ODP.

Lycos also uses indexed search results from Fast/AllTheWeb.com. Fast has a percentage stake in Fast. In addition, they supplement their search results with info from click through counters and their own database.

Lycos also running a click-through counter to their sister site HotBot. The click through counter is the same one used for Direct Hit counting. Direct Hit counts are starting to influence site listings on Lycos. And that is why we call it the rats nest search engine.

With all the above, Lycos is tough engine to understand. It says one thing on their submission pages and then acts entirely different when it indexes your site. Their indexing method from their own spider has remained constant, but indexing is haphazard. What works on one page, wont work on another. There seems to be little rhyme or reason to its actions.

There is a great deal of bad, misleading, and plain wrong information out on the net about Lycos's indexing methods. Your best course of action with Lycos is to follow the standard methods of page design and optimization. Make your page index able, submit it, and hope it works out.

Lycos has now switched to only one algo. The method/index system formerly known as Lycos Pro is now the only indexer that Lycos uses. The old full site indexer is history. The newer Lycos Pro model works on a page-by-page basis. If you get a decent ranking on Lycos, leave it alone.

The Lycos spider T-Rex will index only the pages you provide. However; we've had T-Rex walk through our site(s) at random. This is part of that inconsistency we mentioned. We don't expect this to become common place, but you should feel lucky if T-Rex does take a full walk through your site.

Per standard optimization, the stock Lycos (not Alltheweb) indexer gives higher priority for keywords that also appear in the page title, for keywords appearing closer to the top of the page, and it further gives higher priority for keywords appearing closer to each other in page text. It also gives a tad higher ranking for the number of sites linking to you. Lycos indexes meta tags, but they are just more text on the page to Lycos. Searches are case Insensitive. It will use image ALT tags.

Email response: Fair. They have not responded to several emails. However, one important email concerning my site was replied to in-depth. Our record is 15 human replies out of 20 emails in 1998, 10 for 15 in 99, and 4 of 11 in 2000 - the rest have been form replies.

T-Rex Data: Full spider:
Lycos_Spider_(T-Rex)
*.lycos.com lycosidae.lycos.com
or *.pgh.lycos.com
possibly: spider3.srv.pgh.lycos.com
sjc-fe5-1.sjc.lycos.com
bos-spider9b.bos.lycos.com

Known ips:
207.77.91.184
207.77.90.14
207.77.90.20
207.77.90.136
209.67.228.178
209.67.228.19
209.67.228.17
209.67.228.15
200.46.63.87
149.152.154.204
209.67.228.21
62.172.203.25
209.67.228.23
209.67.228.166
195.200.228.34
206.79.171.23
209.67.228.174
209.67.228.109
209.67.228.42
207.77.90.186

Add URL/Check Spider: No client specification
www.lycos.com
or a2z.lycos.com