When you think back to the early days of search, and some of the early players, one name that often pops to mind is Lycos.  Since the bottom fell out of the early search market you haven't heard much from them.  They tried running a few ads a couple of years back (if I'm not mistaken they had a dog in them?).

But according to the New York Times, Lycos is poised to try to reclaim some of its lost luster, albeit under a new name:  Jubii.

Jubii's pitch is that it combines a lot of Web 2.0 technologies, such as email, photos, VoIP, storage, and blogging, into one interface.  As the CEO of the company put it, these things have been around for a while… but no one has successfully integrated them.  He thinks Jubii has found the solution to that problem.

I'd like to say that I was able to give it try and give you some initial first impressions.  But the sign-up form is broken.  You get allll the way to the end, and the silly security captcha doesn't load.  I tried clicking through a few times, hoping that the system would offer me another way to authenticate my human-ness… but it didn't.

Here's a tip, Lycos/Jubii/whatever:  folks with accessibility needs like… say blindness… won't be able to do squat with your captcha.  You should always offer an alternative to the typical graphical captcha for your customers that have difficulties with them.

So I can't give you any real-world experience with Jubii.  Maybe they designed it to be broken until the official launch.  But a quick look in the company's blog shows that it's been an issue for about a week now.  Oh well.  Maybe another time.

It should be interesting to see if Jubii can differentiate itself from the masses of other Web 2.0 startups and old timers that are all competing for Internet surfer's eyeballs.  I have to admit that I'm a little skeptical.  Lycos never did much to differentiate itself as a search engine.  But according to the company, that has changed.

We shall see.