Lycos are ultimately owned by Terra Networks, who are a spin-off from Telefonica, the Spanish equivalent to BT, and a major player in the European telecommunications sector.

The company runs several related but partially autonomous units, regionally based.

Paid Listings

The main www.lycos.com draws results from several places. At the top of the listings are "sponsored results" from Overture. Then comes a listing marked "start here" which is a paid ad from an Internet ad bureau.

Database

Next, the main results (which sometimes start with a "from the Lycos network" listing) is a mixture of FAST and DirectHit results.

Directory

Finally, at the bottom of the listings are some "categories" listings which are drawn from the ODP.

Lycos UK (www.lycos.co.uk) has several arrangements of its own in place, for instance, they use eSpotting for the "sponsored results" although