LookSmart is a search advertising network and management solutions company based in San Francisco. LookSmart provides search advertising products and services to text advertisers, as well as targeted pay-per-click search and contextual advertising via its Search Advertising Network.
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Looksmart is one of the three largest website directory, the other two are Yahoo and ODP. Looksmart is the pay per click directory. This directory also owns and provides results to the Zeal directory. According to looksmart directory, they reach four out of five internet users by providing results to MSN, AltaVista, Netscape NETCENTER, Inktomi, Prodigy, Juno, CNN, Road Runner, Cox Interactive Media, InfoSpace (Go2Net, Dogpile, MetaCrawler) and Ask Jeeves.
Looksmart is originated in 1995. As Looksmart site does not draw as many visitors as Yahoo, nor does its data have as many users as ODP's,but still the directory has several powerful partners that make being listed in it seem attractive. To mention a few of them, MSN, Mamma, Altavista and Dogpile all use Looksmart's data somewhere on their pages or search results. Also, it appears that at least Altavista gives a ranking boost to sites that are present in Looksmart's database.
LookSmart is a fascinating search engine service because it is hard to classify it as merely a search engine. It is powered by WiseNut, with over 180 vertical search sites, a bookmarking and sharing tool Furl now hand over to Diigo, and their very own article search engine as FindArticles.com. LookSmart has a lot to propose any searcher.
LookSmart has been around in a variety of forms since December 1996 which makes it only a few months younger than Yahoo (October 1996) and older than Google by at least a year. LookSmart persists to move ahead in the search space with social bookmarking and social networking tools such as Furl and FindArticles.com, and with the introduction of over 180 vertical search channels they've been able to offer a lot to the searcher.
LookSmart comments:
LookSmart robotically merges all terms with a Boolean AND. It does not hold up use of the + or - symbols, any Boolean operators, or nesting. No phrase or proximity searching is available in Looksmart. LookSmart search terms are automatically searched as a stemmed search that is the results should include all forms of the term including plural, singular, and tense. It does not have case sensitive searching, use either lower or upper case results in the same hits. If the LookSmart search fails to find any strikes in LookSmart, the search is automatically passed on to AltaVista.
