• Gizmodo, Thursday, July 23, 2015 10:40 AM

The inability to monetize search results was the downfall of Lycos as a search engine. Lycos was a search engine, and like all search engines, it tried to figure out how to make money. So the engine ran eye-tracking tests and discovered that the bigger and bolder the ad, the less people looked at them. At the time the entire advertising philosophy was based on making ads flashy, so people would notice them, but people instinctively knew "the good stuff was on the boring part of the page, and that they ignored the parts of the page that we — and the advertisers — wanted them to click on," writes Jim Gilliam. He explains.

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