I notice that Michael Loren Mauldin <fuzzy@lycos.com>, the Inventor, is
Lycos's Chief Scientist at the moment (according to
<URL:http://www.fuzine.com/mlm/finger.html>, last updated 1997-10-31,
and <URL:http://www.fuzine.com/mlm/>, last updated 1998-03-22.)
(Interesting side bit: Mauldin seems to be the guy who wrote
Rogomatic. <URL:http://www.fuzine.com/mlm/rgm84.html>.)
Lycos's web pages <URL:http://www.lycos.com/lycosinc/legal.html> tell
me that they have another patent pending on "Lycos Pro", which appears
to be <URL:http://lycospro.lycos.com/lycospro-nojava.html>. I'm not
clear on what, exactly, about "Lycos Pro" is patentable.
What I'm wondering is: does Google's spider operate in the way
described in the patent?
I'm surprised Lycos hasn't got a patent on exactly what Google's
doing. I'm also curious whether Lycos is already doing what Google is;
after all, they already have the "goodness" rankings, and all they'd
have to do would be use them to rank search results.
-- <kragen@pobox.com> Kragen Sitaker <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/> [around 1998-12-23], it is amazing to watch fear and loathing and greed at play with the more speculative Internet stocks. To call this a tulip craze would be a vast understatement. -- Adam Rifkin, <adam@cs.caltech.edu>