Terra Lycos Launches Paid Inclusion and Hosted Site Search with Unique Internet Offering, Lycos InSite Select and InSite Pro Subscription Services

• Lycos InSite Select lets Web site owners submit their sites to Lycos for guaranteed inclusion in the Lycos Web index, one of the world’s largest search engines, within 48 hours, giving site owners greater visibility on the Internet.
• Lycos InSite Pro offers both paid inclusion and hosted site search, giving Web site owners access to Lycos’s superior search functionality within their sites.

"The Web is projected to grow to more than 10 billion pages in the near future and Web site owners face a real challenge in staying in front of the right customers with up-to-date content," said Tom Wilde, general manager of search services for Terra Lycos. "Search engine marketing is a powerful and cost effective tool for delivering the right people to the right sites. However, once they get there, they’ll leave if they can’t find what they’re searching for. With the Lycos InSite product offerings, Web site owners can expose their sites to our millions of Lycos users, and provide site search capabilities at the same time."

According to IDC (International Data Corporation), more than 50 percent of Web searches are abandoned, and up to 97 percent of some search sites’ searches show no click throughs to any results. Jupiter Media Metrix (Nov. 2001) also notes that 55 percent of all e-commerce transactions originate with a search listing and 80 percent of online users will abandon a site with poor search functionality. Lycos InSite products give Web site owners a marketing tool to increase their visibility and distribution through Lycos Search, one of the leading search engines on the Internet, and the opportunity to potentially increase revenue, reinforce brand recognition and improve customer loyalty. Additionally, Lycos’s hosted site search helps users find what they are looking for once they reach a site.

"It’s vital for the enterprise to develop a strategy that ensures customers can find them amidst the clutter on the Web while Web search engines, on the other hand, have the responsibility of returning the most accurate and relevant results they can," said Sue Feldman, IDC’s analyst for search technologies. "As we noted in ‘The End of the Search Engine Cold Wars,’ the problem for Web search engines has been to find a viable business model to support them, while they continue to provide unbiased, honest and accurate search results to the public. By giving webmasters the tools and guidance to make sure their web sites are included in a search, Lycos helps to improve the quality of the search results without compromising their honesty."

Powered by Fast Search & Transfer (FAST), Terra Lycos’s strategic search technology partner, Lycos InSite differentiates itself from other paid search services by listing only the most relevant results first. Since Lycos InSite guarantees inclusion, and not placement or rankings, search result relevancy is not compromised. Lycos InSite also guarantees FAST’s powerful crawler will re-index Lycos InSite results every 48 hours, ensuring the freshest content is available for Web and site searches.

Lycos InSite Select. Starting at $30 per year, Web site owners can submit their sites to Lycos for inclusion in the Lycos Web index within 48 hours of submission, reaching millions of monthly users. Additional features include: