Lycos Europe is available to the right buyer. If you're a newcomer to the internet (and by newcomer, I mean someone who has joined sometime in the last ten years or so), you may not be familiar with the former search giant. But in the old Internet Wild West days of 90s before Google dominated search, Lycos was one of the leading algorithm based search engines (and was my primary search portal for quite a while).
These days, Lycos barely registers as a blip on the radar of search competitors. Even bare blips on the radar in that market have an immense amount of value. Lycos Europe reported, according to Rafat Ali over at PaidContent, EUR 16.2 million in revenue in its first quarter this year, which while off from last year's earnings by about EUR 4 million. Still, with all that money floating around, the search engine ran into net losses for the quarter of EUR 5.9 million.
Interested in taking that sort of loss on a search engine continually declining in influence? Get a hold of your favorite banker over at Dresdner Kleinwort, Lycos' advisor in its bid to find a new strategy.
Our advice? Same advice we give to most of these companies that grow far too big for their britches, so to speak (and the same advice I give Facebook, an organization struggling to meet payroll after becoming a paper-billionaire): trim the fat. You don't need to be that big to be competitive. Look at what's working in the Web 2.0 world - small teams nimble enough to react to the ever-changing landscape of the Internet world.