GTE Directories Corp. and Lycos, Inc. announce groundbreaking agreement to jointly research, develop and market consumerinformation and electronic commerce services on the Web

NEW YORK CITY, Internet World - GTE Directories Corporation and Lycos, Inc., (NASDAQ:LCOS) announced today an alliance to jointly develop a new generation of online services that will enable consumers to fully benefit from the power of the World Wide Web.

The first effort of the alliance, an integration of GTE's SuperPages nationwide interactive directory services and Lycos' City Guide service, which features local information for more than 400 U.S. cities, is expected in January. The second major initiative - a business-oriented Web search engine - is also expected in early 1997. The two companies have already begun basic integration of these services. The integrated services will be available at GTE's SuperPages site and the Lycos home page.

The new services created by the two companies will provide GTE's SuperPages users with a wealth of local information and will offer consumers an unprecedented ability to cut through the clutter of the Web and find true value and utility. The services will leverage the power of Lycos' spider technology of cataloguing Web sites and the industry-leading database of more than 60 million URLs they have indexed, as well as the advanced search capabilities and listings of 11 million businesses in GTE's SuperPages service.

"The synergy created by this agreement between these two premier services will greatly benefit both businesses and consumers," said Pat Marshall, vice president - new media services for GTE Directories Corporation. "It's a case of the end result being greater than the sum of the two parts."

The multimillion dollar alliance between Lycos and GTE Directories Corp.'s affiliate, GTE New Media Services, diverges significantly from conventional online unions and sets a new standard for developing online commercial products. The arrangement goes well beyond "pointing to one another" and includes joint service research, development, marketing, and distribution, plus an extensive integration of the companies' existing Web sites.

"This is not about the exchange of buttons on two Web sites," said Robert J. Davis, president and CEO of Lycos. "It's about bringing two best-of-breed services together to create a product with mainstream relevance. This agreement is a marriage of development powerhouses that will create great things from the deepest levels. It's about common vision."

The first product of the GTE-Lycos joint effort integrates GTE's SuperPages Yellow Pages search into City Guide, a collection of Lycos-authored guides to over 400 of America's largest cities. City Guide gives virtual travelers a snapshot of life in each metropolis - histories, hotspots, and geographical maps - and provides links to Web sites that reflect the special culture and local charm of each city.

GTE's SuperPages service adds the most powerful and accurate Yellow Pages capabilities on the Web, including the ability to search for businesses using keywords such as brands or payment methods. In addition, users merely click on business addresses to see color maps and driving instructions. The GTE service will be tailored to fit the local scope of each of the cities within the growing City Guide service.

"It sounds so simple to unite product and business-oriented information with a comprehensive guide to cities because it's how we do things in everyday life," Marshall said. "But as simple as it sounds, there will be nothing on the Web like this. And this is just the beginning of a series of development efforts to bring useful information to everyday consumers on the Internet."

Cutting through the clutter

Another of those development efforts is the replacement of GTE's 60,000- site business Web site directory with a jointly developed "business site" search service that uses Lycos' spider technology. The goal is to provide consumers with a way to efficiently filter the millions of sites on the Web when searching for business, product, or service information. The new service will help get consumers right to home pages and official business sites when they search on company and product names.

"Lycos clearly has the advanced processing and indexing capabilities needed to meet the needs of GTE's demanding consumer users, " Marshall said. Together in Development and Marketing

The alliance combines a wealth of talent and capabilities in one of the hottest research and development corridors in the country. In collaborating on advanced research and development, Lycos -- based in Marlboro, Mass. -- will be working directly with Waltham, Mass.-based GTE Laboratories, an industry-leading research and development facility that has been instrumental in developing the interactive Yellow Pages service within GTE's SuperPages.

GTE's SuperPages service is distributed to all Internet-connected computers, as well as kiosks located in key airports throughout the country.

GTE also brings nationwide Internet access and Web hosting capabilities to the relationship through GTE Internet SolutionsK. These services will also be integrated and co-marketed to give the relationship a depth that is truly unique in the Internet services business.

"We've combined the premier indexing and search services on the Web with the services of the premier telecommunications and interactive Yellow Pages provider," Davis said. "It's a very powerful combination."

GTE New Media Services Incorporated is an affiliate of GTE Directories Corporation, one of the world's largest telephone directory publishing companies, annually publishing or providing sales, consulting and other services relating to 2,400 directory titles throughout the United States, Europe, Canada, Asia and Latin America with a total circulation of 80 million. GTE Directories is a part of GTE Corporation, Stamford, Conn., one of the largest publicly held telecommunications companies in the world.

Lycos, Inc., based in Marlboro, Mass., is an Internet exploration company and was founded specifically to find, index and filter information on the Internet and World Wide Web. Besides its world-renowned search and spidering technology for topic- or word-specific searching, Lycos now offers users the ability to search specifically for pictures and sounds available on the Web. In addition, the Lycos services include Top 5%, critical assessments of Web sites; the Sites by Subject directory of sites, organized in 16 popular categories and hundreds of sub-categories for easy browsing through topics of information available on the Internet; Lycos Road Maps; Lycos PeopleFind; Lycos City Guide; and more.

CMG Information Services, Inc. (NASDAQ:CMGI), is a majority stakeholder in Lycos, Inc., through its strategic investment and development business unit, CMG@Ventures.

CMGI is a leading provider of direct marketing services investing in and integrating advanced Internet, interactive media and database management technologies.