The new design of the Lycos search portal

(Nov. 5 2001) Lycos has gone live with its new search portal interface. Pandia likes it.

The most successful search site these days, Google, is focusing solely on searching, while AltaVista, who seems to have lost the portal race, is trying to do the same.

The main reason is that the giving-you-all-possible-services-in one-portal-including-horoscopes strategy wasn't as profitable as the experts believed in the good old days -- in the late nineties that is. Go and NBCi has for all practical purposes given up, and Excite is dying.

On the other hand. A lot of people are using portals, and a company like European-American conglomerate Terra Lycos clearly believes the concept continues to have a future. Lycos.com has now been given a welcome face lift.

Design

The game in this business has for a long time been to push as much content as possible into the home page. The origin of this philosophy seems to be the fear that they will loose you -- the visitor -- if you cannot find what you are looking for on the front page.

On the other hand: If the front page consists of several screenfuls of boxes, columns and pictures, that bewildering mix may cause you to leave anyway (which may partly explain the success of the plain and minimalistic Google search site).

As portal lay outs go, this is a very successful one. The editors have been careful not to fill the home page with too much content; it is organized in a sensible manner and the search field is where it should be: at the top. They have even given us space for longer queries.

The home page may be personalized, i.e. you may select content to your own liking. There is also a search engine content filter for the faint at heart.

Powered by Fast

Pandia's main concern is of course the Web search part of the portal, and as reported earlier, all Lycos sites are now powered by the Norwegian search engine Fast.

This search engine just keeps getting better, and has become a powerful competitor to the mighty Google, not because of its own search site, Alltheweb, but because of its reach through portals like Lycos.

Still, one should remember that even if Lycos is using the Fast search engine database as the backbone of its search services, that does not mean that the search results at Lycos and Alltheweb are completely identical.

Lycos might add results from its own small selection of sites ("From the Lycos Network"), and at the end of the first page of results Lycos will include relevant categories from the Open Directory. To get access to the Open Directory category tree you click on a "Web directory" link in the upper right corner of the home page.

Lycos will also include paid listings (i.e. text ads) under the heading of "Featured listings". We really wish they could mark these as "Paid listings" or "Sponsored listings". That would certainly bring the company more credibility and goodwill.

Search query transfer

By the end of the result page there is a search form with your search query filled in. You may tick of one of three alternatives: "Web directory" (i.e. the Open Directory), "HotBot" and "Direct Hit" and transfer your search to one of these search services.

If Lycos/Fast cannot give you what you are looking for, a search at HotBot might be useful as it will feed you results from the alternative Inktomi search engine. They ought to add a fourth alternative, however, namely "Web searching", so that searchers may edit their query and continue using the Lycos/Fast index.

By the way, HotBot is also part of the Terra Lycos network. It has been given a face lift as well, but more dramatic changes are expected.

Advanced searching

Lycos remains hampered by Fast's relatively weak support for true Boolean searching, but the advanced search page nonetheless gives you access to some powerful tools.

The advanced search "homepage" supplies a pull down menu that lets you select an AND, OR or phrase search (for the meaning of these terms see the Goalgetter search engine tutorial).

On this page you may also tick of various types of resources, thus limiting your search to music files, weather, Reuters news headlines, stocks, recipes, software and more.

Another link, Page field, brings you to a page where you can limit your search to the title field of a webpage (i.e. the text visible in the windows bar), the URL (web address) and host (like pandia.com). There are also separate pages for selecting languages and link referrals.

The fact that these features are divided on several pages, makes each page easier to read. On the other hand, it makes it difficult (or impossible) to limit your search to webpages in a specific language and for instance a specific file type -- but then again, that will probably not be that useful anyway.

Search engine math (i.e. using the + and - symbols and double quotation marks for exact phrases) is allowed, true Boolean operators like AND and AND NOT are not.

Sites like the British version of Lycos has not been modernized.

• Lycos (International US version)
• Lycos Advanced Search Results Help

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