Free Republic

Ranking talk show hosts using differing methods, two lists are making big waves today. Al Franken can't possibly be happy with the just-released 2005 Lycos Top Radio Hosts list, where he fell all the way out of the top 20, after ranking 10th in 2004. Each year, Lycos ranks radio personalities based on Internet search enquiries. While that's certainly a novel approach to ranking popularity, it probably doesn't tell the whole story. Oddly, while Franken vanished, Air America co-conspirator Janeane Garofalo made this year's list, in 12th place.

The screensaver uses idle computers to tackle spam sites A plan to bump up the bandwidth bills of spammers seems to be getting out of control. Earlier this week Lycos Europe released a screensaver that bombards spam websites with data to try to increase the cost of running such sites. But analysis shows that, in some cases, spam websites are being completely overwhelmed by the traffic being directed their way. The Lycos plan has also come under fire for encouraging vigilantism. Attack pattern Lycos Europe's "Make love not spam" campaign was intended as a way for users to fight...

Lycos Europe's "Make love not spam" campaign has killed access to some of the Web sites of its target alleged spammers, Netcraft has found. According to the Internet traffic monitoring company, Lycos Europe has successfully taken two Web sites hosted in China offline. The sites are bokwhdok.com and printmediaprofits.biz, according to a posting on Netcraft's Web site, dated this week. "A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack launched by users of Lycos Europe's MakeLoveNotSpam.com screensaver has succeeded in crippling several spammer sites, but some of the targeted sites remain available," the posting said.Lycos Europe was unavailable for comment on the matter, but...

Spanish Internet company Terra Lycos has retained investment bank Lehman Brothers to explore a possible sale of its U.S. Internet business, including its flagship Lycos.com Web site, according to a document obtained by CNET News.com. What's new: Terra Lycos has retained investment bank Lehman Brothers to sell Lycos.com in hopes of focusing on its Spanish-language businesses.Bottom line: The sale would unwind the $12.5 billion merger of Terra Networks and Lycos, struck during the height of the dot-com boom. A sale of the unit, which is based in Waltham, Mass., would unwind the $12.5 billion merger of Lycos and Terra Networks,...

<p>SAN FRANCISCO (AP) --  Online search engines are built to find information in seconds. But most leading sites appear to be taking their time meeting a federal request for more transparency on how money influences their display of search results.</p>