Lycos enjoyed several years of growth during the 1990s and became the most visited online destination in the world in 1999, with a global presence in more than 40 countries.

[7] Lycos started offering e-mail services in October 1997,[8] the same year it became one of the first profitable Internet businesses in the world.

[11] On May 16, 2000, near the peak of the dot-com bubble, Lycos announced its intent to be acquired by Terra Networks, the Internet arm of the Spanish telecommunications giant Telefónica, for $12.5 billion.

Having been set back by the dot-com bubble burst, Lycos abandoned its own search crawler in late 2001, and started using FAST.

The company moved away from being a search-centric portal and toward a community destination for broadband entertainment content.

[13] With a new management team in place, Lycos also began divesting properties that were not core to its new strategy.

[16] As part of a corporate restructuring to focus on mobile, social networks and location-based services, Daum sold Lycos for $36 million in August 2010 to Ybrant Digital, an Internet marketing company based in Hyderabad, India.

[22] In June 2015, Lycos announced a pair of wearable devices, called Band and Ring.