Lycos Catalogs More than 10 Million Web Sites

Most comprehensive Internet catalog indexes nearly 92 percent of the Web with fastest search engine and most powerful indexing technology

INTERNET WORLD, Boston, Mass. -- October 30, 1995 -- Lycos, Inc., provider of the world's fastest and most comprehensive Internet catalog, today announced at the Internet World conference that it has cataloged more than 10 million sites, representing nearly 92 percent of the World Wide Web. No other catalog lists more than 1 million sites or 8.5 percent of the Web.Lycos' catalog currently covers 10,797,133 Web sites. Current calculations put the number of Web pages, or Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) at 11,745,521 hosted around the world on 103,059 Web servers. New Web servers are coming online at a rate of 6,000 per month, adding more than 1.1 million URLs every month.

"Lycos has the fastest and most powerful search and indexing technology anywhere on the Web," said Robert J. Davis, president and chief executive officer of Lycos, Inc. "With that technology, Lycos can provide the largest, most comprehensive and most timely catalog of the Internet -- no small accomplishment when the Web is growing at more than 10% per month."Unique search and indexing technology

Using patent pending technology, the Lycos spider samples the Web continuously, and merges the results of its searches into the Lycos catalog on a weekly basis. Lycos searches not just "http" sites, but also includes FTP and gopher addresses. Unlike other Web catalogs or directories, Lycos indexes non-text Internet resources including graphics, sounds, full-motion video and executable programs. Lycos provides a user with not only a list of all the sites a search has found, but also a ranking of the sites based on a "popularity" score for each of the sites. The popularity score for a particular site is calculated on the total number of other sites that contain links to that site. With its technology, Lycos also automatically creates abstracts of the most popular sites, allowing users to quickly and efficiently determine which sites are relevant to their searches.

"Our estimates of the size of the Web are conservative," noted Dr. Michael L. Mauldin, chief scientist of Lycos, and developer of the Lycos spider technology at Carnegie Mellon University. "Nevertheless, with our technology we have been able to rapidly identify and catalog new Web sites at a rate that exceeds the growth rate for the Internet as a whole.

The 10 millionth Web site cataloged by the Lycos spider deals with "Fun Insect Facts." The site, http://ham.spa.umn.edu/kris/science.html, is a sub-page of a home page belonging to a fourth year graduate student at the University of Minnesota, Kristine Sigsbee. Ms. Sigsbee, who is conducting research on space physics, spent the summer as a volunteer at the Science Museum of Minnesota where she worked as an Exhibit Interpreter for "Backyard Monsters", i.e., insects such as dragonflies, cockroaches, and, of course, spiders.

Last month, Lycos acquired New York City-headquartered Point Communications, Inc. Now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Lycos, Point is the publisher of the premier online review and rating guide for the Internet, Point Survey. By offering thousands of reviews of Web sites, Point provides the largest and most timely collection of Web reviews available anywhere online and serves six million hits per month. In addition, the newly introduced -- and totally free -- Point Now service provides a real-time update of news and general interest stories from around the world, along with personalized updates on a variety of special interest subjects.

Based in Marlboro, Massachusetts, Lycos also has offices in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A totally free service for users, Lycos currently serves more than 30 million queries per month -- making it one of the most popular destinations on the World Wide Web. Lycos, funded by CMG@Ventures, a wholly-owned strategic investment and development subsidiary of CMG Information Services, Inc. (NASDAQ:CMGI), is the exclusive licensee of the Lycos spider technology originally developed at Carnegie Mellon University, one of the world's leading computer science centers. Both Lycos and Point derive revenues from advertising. Lycos also derives revenues from licensing its technology and Internet catalog to companies such as Microsoft Corporation and Frontier Technologies Corporation.

Lycos may be reached at http://www.lycos.com and Point at http://www.pointcom.com. The Lycos "Catalog of the Internet" Copyright - 1994, 1995 Carnegie Mellon University. All rights reserved. This product or portions thereof is produced under license from Carnegie Mellon University, patent pending. Point, Survey and Point Now are service marks of Point Communications Corporation. All other product or service marks mentioned herein are those of their respective owners.