Surprising many that it still exists, internet search pioneer Lycos Inc. announced Wednesday that it intends to sell the majority of its patent portfolio as it is refocusing to sell “a suite of hard good products.”

According to reports, Lycos is looking for a buyer for patents that are said to cover search engines, online ads, and even online games.

“For us, it is of strategic importance to utilize all assets of the company in a manner consistent with current market trends, as well as our collaborative corporate culture, ” Lycos President Brad Cohen said in a statement.

Lycos patents have been repurposed previously, with Google losing a court battle over a former Lycos patent in 2012, although that ruling was later overturned on appeal.

Spun off from a research project at Carnegie Mellon in 1994, Lycos was one of the original big search engines in the early days of the commercial internet, preceding Google by four years.

Credited as being one of the first sites to index the web (at the time Yahoo was a directory,) Lycos thrived during the first tech boom, and was sold at the very peak of the bubble in 2000 for $12.5 billion ($17.7 billion in 2015 dollars) to Terra Networks.

Following the dot-com bust, Lycos started to lose its market share and slipped away into obscurity by the mid to late 2000’s as Google came to dominate the market.

The company changed hands several times over the last few years, and although it calls itself today a “digital media powerhouse” (they actually used that term in their press release) it’s a shell of its former self.

IoT company?

Now based in India, Lycos didn’t explain exactly what the hard goods market was it was heading into, but it would appear from earlier reports in the Indian press that Lycos is trying to reinvent itself as an Internet of Things company.

According to one report, Lycos launched a division called Lycos Life May 14, a service that promises to “help people manage their IoT life.”

“More and more people will rely on the Internet as more Internet-enabled devices are introduced to the market. Within the next ten years, IoT is predicted to become a $19 trillion market. Lycos is developing ways to help users sync their Internet data with their everyday lives,”Lycos Chief Executive Officer Suresh Reddy.

The company is said to be preparing to launch “two products next month that help [users] simplify the way they leverage Internet for their daily use,” whatever that means.

It kind of sad really that what was once such a great company continues to go on in a sad fashion; we’d put a dog down for lesser issues.

Intellectual property broker The Propeller(y) is handling the sale of the patents.