1998 isn’t “originally” when Lycos started in 1994. That 1998 snapshot would be their “portal” era, I’d imagine.

And the page where you submitted your website to Lycos – that’s no different than what Google used to have. It just submitted your website to the spider. There’s no indication in that snapshot that suggests that it would get your site added to a curated web-directory.

Those late 90’s web-portal sites were a pale imitation of the web indices that Yahoo, and later DMoz/ODP were at their peak. I imagine that the Lycos portal, for example, was only managed/edited by a small handful of Lycos employees, and they were moving as fast as they could in the direction of charging websites for being listed in their portal/directory. The portal fad may have died out before they got many companies to pony up for listings.

I think in the Lycos and AltaVista cases, they were both search engines originally (mid 90s) and than jumped on the “portal” bandwagon in the late 90s with half-assed efforts that don’t deserve to be held up as examples of something we might want to recreate.

Yahoo and DMoz/ODP are the only two instances I am aware of that had a significant (like, numbered in the thousands) number of websites listed, and a good level of depth.

Lycos, Excite, AltaVista, and of course Yahoo all were originally web directories of this sort.

Both Wikipedia and my own memory disagree with you about Lycos and AltaVista. I’m pretty sure they both started as search engines. Maybe they briefly dabbled in being “portals”.

Do Wangs count? Not sure if they were designed for office/business tasks, but I think they were marketed for office/business tasks.

I saw the “electrek.co” in the overview and thought “that sounds the website of an electric bike manufacturer/seller”, but I clicked it anyways, not realizing what I should expect.

I should have known it would be a lame “Bet you didn’t know all these wonderful benefits to this product we’re selling” article.

(Apparently they’re technically not a manufacturer/seller, but it’s definitely a shill article)