Lycos' TOP 5%

» see point.lycos.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Nineteen category buttons across the top, a star-shaped badge in the corner, and a claim no search engine would dare make today. The home page in October 1997 read: "Welcome to Lycos TOP 5%, your personal guide to the best sites on the Web. TOP 5% is a selective directory of top-shelf sites rated by the Web's most experienced reviewers." Nothing in it was crawled or voted on. It was read by people who were paid to read.

The thing started as Point Communications, a New York outfit working out of a building on the north end of Union Square, which had been publishing a rating of the web's best sites since 1995. Lycos bought Point that same year, kept the editorial operation, and ran it under two addresses at once: pointcom.com for the brand it had purchased and point.lycos.com for the portal it was feeding. The categories were the ones a 1997 magazine used. Autos, careers, fashion, government, kids, money, science, travel. Each one had its own navigation graphic, hand-drawn, about 4 KB.

Then the portal era arrived and a directory of hand-written reviews became the most expensive square footage Lycos owned. The last capture of point.lycos.com serving its own content is 12 October 1999, still carrying a Top 5% search box and a row of links to Tripod, Angelfire and HotBot. The next capture, 29 February 2000, is a 302 to www.lycos.com. Nothing in between.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how a site got rated ~

The markup gives the method away. The directory shipped a set of sort buttons named sortalpha, sortcontent, sortdesign and sortoverall, which means a reviewed site carried a score for what it said and a separate score for how it looked, with an overall number rolled up from both. You could re-sort a whole category on any of them. A page could be ugly and still rank if the writing was good, which is a judgment call no algorithm has made before or since.

There was also a graphic called review_flag.gif sitting in the same asset directory, which suggests the reviews were dated and flagged as they were refreshed. Somebody was maintaining this by hand, category by category, for five years.

~ the badge ~

The badge traveled much further than the directory did. If your site got in, you were allowed to display a small star with "TOP 5%" set into it, 125 pixels wide, and people did. It sat on personal homepages next to the visitor counter, and it meant something specific: a stranger with an editorial job had looked at your page and ranked it above ninety-five percent of what else was out there.

I got online in 1998 on a 33.6k modem, which means I arrived in Turkey roughly a year and a half before this thing stopped. I never once browsed the directory. I saw the badge constantly, because the badge is what crossed over. Era furniture travels at the speed of an image file; a US-staffed English-language review desk does not travel at all. Half the badges I remember were on pages that had been awarded one years earlier, by an editorial operation that no longer existed.

~ the day the door closed ~

Lycos did not announce anything, and the two addresses died differently. point.lycos.com became a redirect to the portal root and stayed one for a decade. pointcom.com, the name Lycos had actually paid for, was simply let go: by 1 March 2000 it was answering with a 1,247-byte placeholder reading "Pointcom total e-commerce solution" and "New site opening February 2000," from somebody else entirely. By that August the same domain was a keyword farm with rows of links for gambling and home loans.

Lycos kept running for another decade. The idea that a company would pay humans to sit and read the web, then publish the results as a list, did not.

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