With today s announcement, Lycos has the best search and directory infrastructure and begins a 100 day roll-out of products and features that set new standards for relevancy, accuracy, and quality of user interface. WiseWire clearly has both extremely valuable technology and remarkable talent across many areas, said Robert J. Davis, CEO of Lycos. The combination of Lycos and WiseWire brings the interactive and collaborative underpinnings of the Web to users, and we expect this new paradigm to raise the bar for our competitors. The WiseWire technology finds, prioritizes, and organizes relevant content from the Internet into thousands of pre-defined hierarchical directories. These directories, which are based on thousands of categories, allow Lycos users to teach the system which sites they like and don't like using simple rating buttons.
Sites continually bubble up or down based on user preference.
Quickly and automatically, the system learns which sites are popular within a particular topic and populates that category with dynamic, real-time content. Lycos recognized our unique and highly marketable technology, as well as the outstanding strengths of our research and development, product, and management staff, said Dennis Ciccone, President of WiseWire. We are thrilled to join the Lycos family, a leading media brand and a financially successful company. The merging of our companies is a perfect fit. Together we can offer users, advertisers, and key Internet players the Web's most valuable search, navigation, and directory service under one powerful brand.