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BY SNAPPING UP TRIPOD, SEARCH ENGINE LYCOS HOPES TO CONVINCE ITS MASSIVE AUDIENCE TO HANG OUT A WHILE.

BY JAMES SUROWIECKI | Lycos, the search-engine company, recently decided to shell out $58 million in stock to acquire Tripod, the online community and home-page provider, proving two things: First, the Internet is going to get smaller even as it gets bigger; and second, there is still gold in them thar hills. At least for some of us.

The deal offers Tripod's owners, Dick Sabot and Bo Williams, enormous wealth -- even if much of it remains on paper, at least for now. It also gives Tripod the chance to provide a kind of one-stop shopping site where members can find everything they need -- e-mail, news, weather, entertainment and more -- without ever leaving the site's cozy confines. For Lycos, the deal is a crucial step in its transformation from a search engine into what's now called a "portal" site. Lycos wants to be a place users go first when they get on the Net, and it wants to be a place users return to regularly. With Tripod and its nearly 1 million loyal members added to Lycos' fold, the company may be able to turn itself into just such a spot.

"Lycos traditionally has been search and navigation," says Ted Philip, the company's chief operating officer. "People come to us to go elsewhere. But what we've been trying to do is build the kind of sense of community that makes people come back more often and stay longer. We're evolving from a go-to and go-through site to a destination site."

The problem for the search-engine sites -- Yahoo! InfoSeek, Excite and many, many others -- has always been that although they were able to generate huge amounts of traffic, it's been mostly drive-through traffic from users stopping in on their way elsewhere. Surprisingly, these search engines have nonetheless been successful at getting advertisers to pay for the privilege of having banner ads flash before users' eyes as they clicked on to real destinations. It's clear, however, that the only way to make a search-engine business thrive is to convert it into something other than a search engine -- to turn it, that is, into something like AOL.

In part, that would mean providing the basics -- news, weather, e-mail, etc. -- that have made AOL so successful. But it also means something else. The horror of AOL, for people who have spent a long time on the Net, has always been AOL's impulse to repackage the Net in a simpler, cornier and somehow safer style. The genius of AOL -- outside of its over-the-top marketing -- has always been its chat rooms and message boards, where people with common interests talk endlessly to each other. It's a peculiar sort of genius, to be sure, and not one that anybody should necessarily want to duplicate (those further reaches of AOL's sex chat rooms do call the fate of the republic into question). But what, for lack of a better word, we now call "community" is clearly a central part of AOL's appeal.

The search engines can't offer anything like that. You might use Lycos every day, but you wouldn't think of yourself as a member of the Lycos community. How, after all, could you really be loyal to a search engine? Thus Lycos' need for a connection to something like Tripod.

N E X T+P A G E+| The horizontal model