I can't see you in the list of subscribers to the robots list,
(to which this is cc'ed) so maybe you missed a message regarding
patents there.
In http://www.lycos.com/reference/faq.html one reads:
> We have a patent pending on our spider technology, which makes it
> possible for us to both keep up with the exponential growth of the
> Internet, and still find the most popular sites.
Can you give any further details, either on the technical nature or
the patent application?
-- Martijn
__________
Email: m.koster@webcrawler.com
WWW: http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/mak.html