According to Bo Peabody, co-founder of Tripod and vice-president network strategy of Lycos, the company aims to develop localised versions of Lycos sub-brand portals such as Tripod, Angelfire, MailCity, WhoWhere and HotBotfor Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, Singapore and India. The company is already present in Japan through a tie-up with Sumitomo Corporation and in Korea through a tie-up with Mirae Corporation.

"Having a presence in this area is very central to our strategic growth plans. Having Indian language versions of Lycos Web portals will mark a big achievement for us and we are keen to work with the Indian Web developer community," said Peabody, who was a keynote speaker at the India Internet World on the concluding day.

Peabody founded Web community company Tripod in 1992 and sold it to Lycos in 1997 for $58 million. Likewise, Angelfire, MailCity, WhoWhere and HotBot were bought by Lycos at different times, but unlike other search engine companies like Yahoo, Lycos has retained the separate identities of each of these portals as part of its multi-brand strategy. Lycos is in the process of forming similar joint ventures, as the one with SingTel, round the world to take on Yahoo and Excite. It had started the process by entering its first such JV with Bertelsmann in 1997 which resulted in as many as 11 localised Lycos sites in European countries in a variety of languages.

According to Peabody, the internet world would see a major shakeout among the search engine companies within next two years. Only two or three companies will ultimately survive out of top engines like Yahoo, Lycos, Excite, CMGI AltaVista, AOL, eBay, Microsoft, Amazon and Priceline.

According to Peabody, Lycos was working on a definite plan for developing content to fill in the broadband access services arena. It recently acquired a company called Sonique which makes MP3 software. It is keen to have software development done from India for internet devices.

In April this year, the company claimed that Lycos network had surpassed the Yahoo sites to become the most visited internet hub with a 51.8 per cent reach.