Technology · 3

By 1996, Lycos had catalogued roughly what percentage of the World Wide Web's pages, earning it a reputation as one of the web's most comprehensive early crawlers?

Answer

Around 90%

In its early peak years, Lycos boasted indexing close to 90% of the known web — an extraordinary achievement given how rapidly new sites were coming online in the mid-1990s. This breadth made it a dominant destination before purpose-built search algorithms like Google's PageRank overtook it.

💡 Did you know?

Lycos, once a top-five search engine, declined so rapidly that by 2004 it was bought for $95 million—a fraction of its peak value just five years earlier.

Other options people guess

  • Around 30%
  • Around 55%
  • Around 10%

Topics

  • 1990s
  • search-engines
  • web-history
  • dot-com
  • nostalgia

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