Did Lycos Dump Ask.com for Yahoo?

In a recent review of rankings for a client, our astute search specialist noticed a new trend in Lycos search. The search rankings from Lycos usually are a close match to those from ASK their search partner. Recently, however, the results have shown a closer match between Lycos and Yahoo! rankings.

Lycos has issued no recent press releases or announcements regarding a change of search partner and until these recent developments we just assumed Lycos was still powered by ASK.com, whose partnership was announced in November 2006.

Upon further investigation of the Lycos search results pages we’ve noticed that the links are now redirecting through an Overture.com (Yahoo) web address, both for Sponsored Links and Web Results.

Check out the screenshot below of Lycos search results.

We have yet to find an official confirmation or denial of this story online, but from these findings we’re wondering if Lycos has quietly switched search results partners from ASK to Yahoo!

Why would they do that? What happened to Ask? All good questions that at the moment we don’t have the answers to.

Blogosphere - do you have any details? If so please comment and provide links. Thanks!

Update 6/16: Lycos PR Director has confirmed that Lycos is now using Yahoo! search and sponsored ad results.

“We can confirm this change in search results provider due to specific business decisions.” Kathy O’Reilly, Director of PR, Lycos.

I pressed for more information about these “specific business decisions” and have been told that there will be no public annoucement of this change and no further comment. 

2 Comments »

1. Have you seen Lycos Retriver (beta) yet?
   http://www.lycos.com/retriever.html

   An “educated” guess tells me there is a connection.

   Comment by Sylvia Dombrowski — June 28, 2008 @ 12:36 pm

2. Thanks for the post Sylvia - I took a look at Retriever and it’s an interesting product though it makes me wonder if we’re going backwards in time to the ODP?

   I see that Lycos is trying to differentiate themselves from Wikipedia and things like Digg etc - I wonder though how Lycos “evaluates both the quality and freshness” of the links they provide. Do you think they might be using some Yahoo! technology for this type of product? I’m not sure we’re seeing the connection over here.

   Retriever evaluates both the quality and the freshness of the information it’s reporting. What it returns to the user is a briefing book, with perspectives from all over the Web, not a dry encyclopedia article or one person’s opinion on a subject.

   Comment by Bonnie Jones — June 30, 2008 @ 9:15 am

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