A thread at Search Engine Watch forums named Late Lycos Notice discusses a blog posting over at Smart-Keywords.com. In this blog posting, AussieWebmaster said that he received an email from Lycos stating that they have made changes to their "Legacy SearchSubmit (Inktomi) section of the InSite program.
Effective February 18, 2005, Inktomi search results ceased appearing on the lycos.com and hotbot.com search engines. As a result, URLs submitted for inclusion in the Inktomi search catalog will no longer appear on the Lycos and Hotbot search engines. Inktomi will continue to submit your URLs to other search engine partners, including Overture.com and About.com. And as always, the Inktomi crawler will continue to refresh your URLs every 48 hours.
What is interesting, as Danny Sullivan noted in the thread, "they aren't saying the program will submit you to Yahoo but instead only results at Overture that few will ever see." And even more, "As for About.com, help me if I'm missing something. When I looked today, About.com doesn't appear to offer any web search results at all."
Danny sums up by saying:
In another words, whatever people spent on a flat-fee submission with Lycos, it's hard to see any value still remaining to it -- not that there was likely much before other than being on Lycos itself.
