Sympatico

Sympatico-Lycos, Inc changes search providers

[gerardio]

I noticed today that Sympatico (A canadian search engine) has changed from using Lycos results to Google results today. It is now showing a google add url page. Lycos owns 29% of Sympatico-Lycos, Inc.
This is an interesting turn for them.

[Tim Judd FAST]

Hi, this is Tim Judd and I'm Director Account Management for FAST.

I wanted to comment on this thread. Lycos world wide is a collection of
joint ventures which are highly autonomous. Although we power (in query volume terms) the majority of Lycos world wide, individual entities work autonomously. The search market (as you know) is very dynamic and aggressive, it has different requirement in different markets and local partners choose appropriately.

2001 was the best year on record for FAST
and we think 2002 will be even better. We added T-Online Group, Tiscali Group, Terra.es, WIND IOL and Tellus Canada (to name but a few) to our growing reach, watch for more interesting announcements in the near future.

We were sorry to see the departure of Simpatico and Web.de. Each had their own (very different) reasons. Some of the reasons have been pretty well identified in this thread. In neither case was quality of service a key issue. Please feel free to contact me with questions about our service and I'll be glad to substantiate/quash rumors as and when I can.

Very best wishes

Tim

Tim Judd
Director, Account Management
Fast Search and Transfer

[heini]

Hello Tim - welcome to the board

It's a nice gesture to lend webmasters here at WebmasterWorld an ear - open minded communication will be beneficial for both sides.

MacGuru - thanks for reminding us of the original topic and title of this thread.
I certainly believe you when you describe the bad state of Sympaticos SERPs. Lycos.com has had a major clearout on their SERPs some months ago - before they had been cluttered with all kinds of different results from the Lycos network.

This just goes to show that a clear SERP is of course possible with results provided by Fast.

When you say Sympatico has dropped Lycos however, we should perhaps keep in mind and prevent causing any confusion, that Sympatico still shows the Lycos logo and is owned 21% by the TerraLycos group.

(edited by: heini at 4:04 pm (utc) on Feb. 5, 2002)

[Liane]

>AV is not a search engine any more. It's yellow pages in the making.<

Excellent observation Heini! Most of the rest are as well.

[heini]

>watch for more interesting announcements in the near future.

Sure will - several places coming to my mind here...should we think Europe?
Tellus Canada, hmm. Perhaps we should wait with updating Fast's dancecard...

Backus, sure I respect your opinions.

[heini]

End of all speculation
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