Lycos

Receives their web results from a variety of sources. Overture provides the Sponsored entries. The results from the "Popular" section of Lycos come primarily from the Lycos web editors, and secondarily from Direct Hit. In the "Web Sites" section, results come from the Open Directory, Fast Search, and the Lycos web crawler.

The Open Directory powers the category links at the top of the "Web Sites" section, and also provides some web site matches. Below the category links are web site links, which come primarily from Fast Search. Secondary links are provided by the Lycos web crawler.

Although it is not as significant in the results rankings as it used to be, the Lycos web crawler is still spidering the web. The Lycos web crawler does not weigh META tags heavily. Indexing is based on an algorithm that takes a look at components of the URL name, Meta title, text body headings and subheadings, how frequently words appear, where these words appear in relationship to one another, as well as a document abstract (based on full body text).

Any web page that does not have a minimum of 75 words is not indexed but Frames are supported. Lycos does not care about case sensitivity. They will not allow special characters in text, so avoid ?, =, and $. Pages are added in 3 to 6 weeks.

The thing to remember is that you must have suitable URL content and be engineered to beat your competition within Lycos before you register your pages. Just registering with Lycos does not assure a suitable ranking.