The centre of page HTML has been replaced by an ugly dump of text in several European languages (starting in German - v useful for the UK)that says:
"Because of maintenance work, our services will not be available from Saturday, 27 April at 6:00 AM CET until Sunday, 28 April, 8:00 AM CET at the latest. We sincerely apologize..." etc etc
It's accompanied by broken image links and is at least 4 scrolls down the screen in length at high resolution.
Despite all this, the search and email work fine.
Question is, will they have seen a fall off in searches this weekend - affecting advertisers, ppc camapigns etc - and how can they make their website such a god-awful mess and not notice themselves?
Surely a small message in one langauge would have done? This hardly builds consumer confidence. (And yes, i do know some server downtime is inevitable, but surely this isn't the way to do it?)
Oh, and I've just noticed lycos.fr and is affected too...
So, if anybody wonders why their Lycos referals fell this weekend...
Lycos is going down hill and I can't see it really holding on without some ISP support.
Unfortunatley for them, just weeks after they launched, AltaVista announced they would offer a free ISP - and although they never did, the resulting upheavel in the marketplace stopped the Commundo business model dead.
Some maybe they should tie up with an ISP, as you suggested - maybe a pan European deal with Tiscali or similar.
Only time I look at lycos is for SMS messages, so I cant see any noted change
