Web search existed before Lycos, but it wasn't very good. Michael Mauldin -- better known as Fuzzy -- helped change that when he released Lycos.

Lycos wasn't like any search engine that had come before it. Rather than passively waiting for pages to be submitted, Lycos actively crawled the Web -- like its namesake lycosa spider -- searching for new content it could share with users. Within months of its release, Lycos became one of the most popular search engines on the Internet, and it stayed that way for a few years. During that time, it pioneered many of the things about web search that most of us take for granted today.

So what happened? How did Google overtake Lycos to become the dominant search engine? Find out in this episode of Web Masters.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.