Lycos Moves to Volunteer Indexing

Lycos Inc. will announce today that it is adopting Netscape’s volunteer-indexed Internet directory on its Lycos.com and Hotbot.com Web sites, a step that could boost Lycos in its competition with Yahoo’s hand-selected directory.

The Open Directory Project has picked up steam since November, when Netscape bought NewHoo, the company that pioneered it. Since then, the number of volunteer indexers has swelled to 8,800 and the number of sites listed has grown to 435,000, third behind Yahoo and LookSmart.

The directory has been available on Netscape’s Netcenter page and a few other sites that have licensed it for free.

With Lycos’ sites making up the fourth-most visited network of pages, according to the latest figures from Media Metrix, Netscape hopes the added traffic will lead to more volunteer editors, which in turn will lead to more indexed pages.

Lycos will continue to display its own proprietary Web guide and its search engine’s results.

“This gives us several-orders-of-magnitude more content,” said Lycos Executive Vice President Ron Sege. “This will become the de facto standard.”

The Open Directory Project is part of Netscape’s slow-moving Mozilla effort, which also includes an attempt to improve Netscape’s browser through open work on its source code. America Online, the most visited network of sites, has acquired Netscape but has yet to use the open directory method.