Back in the late 1990s it was not uncommon to find the then CEO of Lycos proclaiming on CNBC that Lycos had more "eyeballs" than Yahoo! Such proclamations usually followed a recent acquisition such as Tripod.com etc. Bob was probably correct, but we all know who won the "eyeball" wars of that era.

Eyeball arguments have been replaced by "Number of Pages Searched" debates. Only now it is Yahoo! that is doing the proclaiming. And Yahoo's opponent is Google. Yahoo claimed, according to a report in the Tuesday edition of The Wall Street Journal, that it now searches 19 billion Web pages compared to Google's 8 billion. Danny Sullivan, master search guru is quoted in the same article that such claims, even if true are irrelevant and a "waste of energy."

I doubt that Yahoo will have the same fate that befell Lycos --- financial failure and irrelevancy. So what is the point of such "proclamations? It has to do with creating a stir on Wall Street. There can be no other reason since I doubt any Google user would turn to Yahoo because it searches more pages.

Turning back to Bob Davis. I believe Bob is now a full time venture capitalist out of Boston? Bob is now largely forgotten, but he should be remembered for trying to make Lycos a media company rather than a mere search engine company. Bob also almost engineered a great deal by merging with Barry Diller's Web build up that began in the late 1990s. Certain Lycos stockholders stupidly killed the proposed merger. Lycos was later sold to Terra of Spain who utterly destroyed a fine property. Barry Diller went on to build IAC and he finally got his search engine with his buy of Ask Jeeves a few weeks ago. Bob and Barry had the right idea in the late 1990s. Both were ahead of the times.