Microsoft Licenses Lycos Catalog -- Carnegie Mellon University announced last week that it has granted Microsoft Corporation a non-exclusive, renewable licence to use its Lycos Internet Catalog with Microsoft's forthcoming online service, Microsoft Network (MSN). Carnegie Mellon will deliver regular updates of the Lycos catalog to Microsoft, who then will presumably make it available to MSN customers. The Lycos catalog operates via a robot that automatically navigates the World-Wide Web and catalogs the documents it finds, including titles and headings, significant keywords, size, and the first 20 lines of the document. To date Lycos has cataloged about three million Web documents and serves more than 175,000 search requests every week. One wonders why Microsoft - supposedly providing comprehensive Internet access via MSN - felt the need to licence a catalog freely accessible via the Internet. Maybe they want to charge for its use. [GD]

http://lycos.cs.cmu.edu/