Lycos has been one of the oldest web crawler and search engines. Originally developed at Carnegie Mellon University to calculate the size of the Internet using a “spider” robot program that wandered around the web from site to site using page links.
The name Lycos comes from Lycosidae, the scientific name for the “wolf spider”. Wolf spiders are excellent hunters that catch their prey by running after it instead of catching it in a web. They are named “wolf” spiders because people once mistakenly thought that they hunted in packs.
The search engine result page of Lycos contained in the very beginning just links to websites relevant for the keyword.
