Lycos was the search engine founded in 1994 as a research project at Carnegie Mellon University. Its creator was Michael Loren Mauldin, whose work turned a university project into one of the early major web-search services.
Lycos began in May 1994 and was supported by about $2 million in venture-capital funding from CMGI. The name comes from Lycosidae, the biological family that includes wolf spiders. The service launched commercially in 1995 and developed beyond search into a broader advertising-supported web portal.
Lycos became an early technology and business success. In April 1996, it completed an unusually rapid initial public offering and became the first search engine to become a public company, ahead of rivals such as Yahoo and Excite.
WebCrawler and Excite are also early search pioneers, which makes them tempting alternatives. AltaVista arrived later, in 1995, while Lycos is the one specifically tied to Carnegie Mellon’s 1994 research project.