Catalog of the Internet

[Alison O'Balle]

web4libers,

Apropos the recent discussions on this list, I thought you might be
interested in these notes from some fellow librarians at the University of
Texas at Austin.

Alison O'Balle
Library Systems
The General Libraries
The University of Texas at Austin
a.oballe at mail.utexas.edu
-------------

A representative from Lycos made a presentation on campus Thursday morning
in which he said a number of interesting things about the future of the
internet, cataloging,and other topics.

In November Lycos will have a nationwide TV campaing advertising themselves
as "The Catalog of the Internet.

Some Numbers:
Lycos ran 30 million searches in October,
by June it will be 100 million searches a month,
Lycos catalogs 9.3 million URLs,
this is 92 percent of the web, they will have 98% of the web by December.
They add or update 400,000 urls a week.
The Lycos catalog is rebuilt every Saturday, this takes 7 hours.
Lycos runs on 15 Sparc 100's and they are adding 11 more.  They will be
moving to Dec Alphas soon.
Nielson is currently rating Internet sites, just like they do for TV.  This
isn't working all that well though.

Search Sites
Yahoo catologs 2% of the web
Infoseek 6%
Open Text 12%
Lycos 92%

Among Lycos users:
6% are under 18
22% are 18-24
39% are 25-35
19% are 36-44
11% are 45-54
3% are 55+

69% are male
31% are female

73% have a BA
29% have an MA or PhD
22% have HS education only
5% no degree

55% are married
45% are single/divorced

6% make over $100,000
5% make $80-10,0000
19% make $50-79,000
21% make $35-49,000
23% make $20-35,000

81% of users use it at home,
64%  use it at work
9.5% use it at school

Most popular search on every Internet search service is "sex"
17,000 searches a day are done on "sex" in Lycos.

They are patenting web spiders and robots.  This was glossed over, but the
lycos guy said the patent process was going well for them so far.

Lycos charges for advertising.
An advertiser gets 1 million impressions (user pulls up advertising on
page) for $20,000.
750,000 impressions for $16,500 etc.
They don't use hits which are misleading, they use impressions.
They also sell keywords to advertisers so for example whenever a user
inputs the keywords phone or MCI or Sprint an add for At & T comes up.

In their test they have found the most effective graphic for advertising
was 6 inches across and 3/4 inch wide.  Advertisers are sent a stack of
information about exactly how well their graphic advertising is working, in
terms of it getting users to respond, every 24 hours.

They will soon be making a current awareness service available so you can
store a search and have the results sent to you every month.  The will soon
be adding field searching, searching with codes, etc.

Some other lycos plans:
Their subsidiary Freemarket communication will offer free e-mail to
everyone.  This will be supported by advertising.  When you send your mai,l
a little graphic like a stamp with the advertisers logo will appear.  The
think this may put compuserve and America Online out of Business since
e-mail is their primary business.

Their subsidary Blacksun will offer realtime video and audio communciations
between individuals.  This is in direct competition to long distance
carriers like AT & T.

Their subsidiary Netcarta will offer automatic web mapping so when you
connect to a site you don't get their home page, but a series of thumbnails
of the pages at the site so you can more easily pick the one you want.

Tehy also plan "Lycosville" which they want to make the largest community
site on the web with shopping, chat groups, black sun-interactive
audio/video phone service, chat gorups, etc.

In Lycos' charter from Carnegie Mellon they are obligated to always be free
-- this puts alot of pressure on subscription services.

They believe that the web will basically be free or supported by
advertising, that subscription services of any kind are unlikely to make it
except in small niche markets.

A simplified description of their cataloging program is that it looks at
every word contained at a web site, tehn ranks the words by where and how
they appear in the document, and indexes the most important words, it also
looks at all the world links to your site to figure out how useful the site
is.  Then it creates an abstract of the site based of the fuzzy logic and
word weighting.

Other news: Open Text and Yahoo have reached an agreement to work together
-- this synergism will likely be lycos's primary competition to cataloging
the Internet given the what everyone agrees is the excellence of opent
text's search, and the excellence of yahoo's human prepared catalog.

--Dennis Dillon, Mark McFarland