10 Years of LookSmart – Visual Timeline
If someone were to ask you which search engines or directories have been in business for the last 10 years and are still going strong, what would be your answer? Google? Nope, Google is somewhere around 7 to 8 years old.
I’ll give you some clues. This search company began as a human edited directory of web sites. After a few years, it went public, acquired another directory, then a search engine technology, launched a pay per click search advertising service, and then acquired one of the first web bookmarking and tagging services.
Recently they’ve been focusing on niche content driven portals, tagging and social applications, Internet security and are expanding their paid search offering beyond search engines (one of their past search advertising partners was MSN) and into contextual.
If you guessed Yahoo!, you’re wrong. And if you guessed LookSmart (or knew already because of the headline) – you’re right on target.
LookSmart, believe it or not, has been around almost as long as Yahoo and is still alive and kicking with its new direction in niche portals and pay per click advertising. In the same fashion as Yahoo and Ask.com, I’ve decided to put together a visual timeline of LookSmart, celebrating their 10 years of delivering search and other services to web users.
LookSmart in 1996 : A very basic link directory with no search box, but a Search tab and “Favorites.” Notice that their logo has not undergone any changes since their initial launch.
In 1998 LookSmart adds a search box, People Search, Yellow Pages, Discussions and Shopping Search. The other tabs on the site include Chat, Email, Classifieds, Weather, Personals and News.
1999 brings a more sleek & streamlined design to LookSmart – The Google Influence? LookSmart also lowercases the letters in their logo.
LookSmart gets a bit funky in 2000 with left side alignment of their directory categories with branded logo and offerings towards the bottom of the page. Was this for SEO purposes? Remember the good old days in 2000 when links at the top left of a web site would get you excellent high traffic listings in Altavista and Excite!
In 2001 we see a shift from information to business solutions as LookSmart heavily promotes its LookSmart listings paid search marketing program along with International Directories, Local City directories, and the marketing of their search technology for ISP’s and Portals.
Enter 2004 with a very sleek redesign with focus on large search box, tabbed search engines, and business solutions marketed at the bottom of the page. Notice that LookSmart begins to market their acquisition of Net Nanny. Hmmm… Where’s Zeal?
Same year, but notice that Net Nanny is now replaced with a marketing message about furl.net - LookSmart’s bookmarking, social search and tagging offering which they had under their wing before Yahoo was Flickr’ing and tasting del.icio.us (the rest is history…).
2006, LookSmart re-capitalizes their name & rebrands as a content driven niche article and social searching entity. Find. Search. Save.
Beyond content and vertical search, they are still showcasing their strongest offerings; furl.net social bookmarking and LookSmart advertising & publisher solutions.
Question is of course, what is the future of LookSmart in this fast moving search world. They seem to have the tools in their utility belt, but have lost a bit of ground over the the past few years.
With current partners such as the New York Times and Local.com, it seems that social bookmarking could be their foundation for the future. Additionally their advertising is still strong and CEO David Hills is positioning the company for a fierce run and profitability.
Where do you see LookSmart in 2007?
2007 look smart Partners with location base search engine MyLocator.com. 300 plus strategic multichannel url’s in a valiant attempt to forever dominate location base vertical search. Hires founder to head LBS vertical search efforts.
I see LOOK in 2007 in the hands of someone like the NYTimes or maybe ASK/IACI.
NYT would be getting Furl which they already use and FindArticles that would be a natural for their archives.
IACI would be getting the ad center, the verticals and FindArticles.
Hills has set up his verticals similar to the way About was set up. All he (or anyone) would have to do is assign category editors and you have an advanced About.com backed by LOOK search and F/A.
Look at how About has helped NYT bottom line over the last 2 reporting periods.
Correct me if I am wrong but aren’t Looksmart the major SEO spammers that are filling the index with keyword-based domains and subdomains (or verticals as you call them) with ‘borrowed’ content and no benefit to the user?
e.g. http://www.looksmarthiking.com
To be honest I am surprised to see a 10 year-old internet company aiming so low.
Actually, the 98 and 99 snapshots, and probably most of the others you’ll get from the way back machine, are plagued by “look text”. This format is designed to be readable by spiders. You can still see this look at
http://www.looksmart.com/r?lt
These aren’t at all what you would see if you went to looksmart with a regular browser in 2000.
You said: “Hills is positioning the company for a fierce run and profitability.”
I agree. In my view they look set to become profitable late 2006. Their owned and operated traffic network seems to be growing remarkably considering the short time since the launch of most of it.
Not sure about 2007, but having a quick look at their financials they’ll run out of cash and die by 2008.
The current CEO has inherited a disaster from the founders who cashed out and skipped town.
Why anyone would waste money advertising on Looksmart these days is beyond comprehension. Using cash to light cigars is a more effective spend.
2007 ?? – “Off to the races”, is how I truly see it …… I posted to a friend on a site, in OZ, that ….Looksmart’s FindArticles.com (ATM) is showing listings within Google US,…….. (or, references/links, to this site) of about 33,500,000, results, for Google US.
When he replied:
“Sighs…..Yes the internet sure is full of big numbers. I just searched on Tomato and got 53,200,000 results”.
I then answered back, with:
Those 53,200,000 results were provided by THE No1 search Engine, Google. And it’s quite remarkable that it has so much information indexed on, the humble “Tomato” …….
I immediately wondered how many of those results needed going through to eventually find the required information, to fully satisfy a searcher’s needs? Looksmart call that both “exhaustive” and quite frankly, “time consuming”, type search.
No, Looksmart hasn’t a Tomato Vertical yet, i went on to say (but thanks to Google), they do have articles on this topic listed (and more defined/refined) within some of their Verticals, thereby allowing “users” to “drill down” or, narrow their search enquiry, so much quicker.
It’s called, “essential” type search. It’s where search is heading, IMHO. Now check this out here: (I told him)
We have now narrowed our search down to just 452,000 results and you will note how Looksmart’s Verticals “segment” this topic into much more practical search results.
Wendy Boswell from About.com, (in a terrific recent review of Looksmart), choose the topic of “cheese” for her search enquiry. (Google has 133,000,000 references, to cheese).
LookSmart Search Tips
LookSmart has a lot to offer. To show you just what I mean, we’ll do a sample search for cheese.
Search results for cheese bring back many search options in LookSmart. First, obviously I have general Web results, but if I want to get deeper in the world of cheese, I can:
* see what others found with Furl: these results are what other people have Furl-ed and made available publicly.
* see what articles there are at FindArticles: not surprisingly there are quite a few articles about cheese over at FindArticles.
* LookSmart news results: find news about cheese; right now there’s an article about a woman eating 26 grilled cheese sandwiches.
http://websearch.about.com/od/enginesanddirectories/a/looksmart.htm
That’s great! But Wendy may not have (as yet) discovered the “joys” of a what is a more simple “FindArticles in…” search term, where Google results again clearly demonstrate how Looksmart’s Verticals “narrow down” result’s choices, even more concisely. (And only, a little over 1M results are shown, this time).
http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=FindArticles+on+Cheese&btnG=Google+Search&meta=
For “cheese and Tomato” connesiours Looksmart’s Verticals will make a lot of sense! Me? I was brought up on a more simple “toasted cheese and tomato” from ‘Hec Kains’ snooker room in Botany Road Mascot, Sydney, many moons ago! And …………. I really haven’t changed my eating habits that much, since!!
Cheers !!
Ross
In my opinion, in 2007 looksmart will change its business model for the 308th time and burn thru the last of its $$. Hills’ tired old sales pitch will keep changing until he’s thrown out, along with the trendy social bookmarking idea and recycled crappy verticals. looksmart will end up in the dustbin of dot com also-rans.
LookSmart got their brand name known very well through their MICROSOFT period,this remains their strongest point, they then lapsed, they are now coming back,furling and all,quite strongly with the right managemet, marketing and technical staff
I worked there from ’97 until about a month ago. If you’d like some better screenshots of the early interfaces I might be able to hook you up…
Although Looksmart’s PPC ads were not effective in the past, I have been testing them recently and recommending them to all my clients who advertise on Yahoo and Google. Traffic is about 7% of Google, the bid costs are generally 70-80% lower and the conversion rates are higher. We are generating substantial and more profitable sales from Looksmart ads.
Hi,
I have a client who is currently doing some business w/LookSmart. How can I tell where their ads appear? I can’t figure it out!
Tx
We have advertised on Looksmart for years, but have never been able to figure out where the ads are actually displaying… and we are not able to track any real ROI. Thinking of pulling the Ads… unless someone can tell us where the ads are appearing?
Don’t pay any attention to Andrew Landeryou above. This website is better informed about Landeryou. http://www.slanderyou2.blogspot.com
Well the poster named “Looking… Smart! on Apr 24, 2006 at 11:35 pm ” got one thing right when he/she said:
————
Hills’ tired old sales pitch will keep changing until he’s thrown out, along with the trendy social bookmarking idea and recycled crappy verticals
————–
Since then Looksmart have built an ads network that was voted the best in the industry.
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/080819/20080819006177.html?.v=1
They have also improved greatly on their quaterly revenues.
Revenues
2005 Q1 $ 12,001
2005 Q2 $ 10,225
2005 Q3 $ 9,165
2005 Q4 $ 9,968
2006 Q1 $ 10,543
2006 Q2 $ 11,130
2006 Q3 $ 12,150
2006 Q4 $ 15,008
2007 Q1 $13,225
2007 Q2 $14,624
2007 Q3 $12,629
2007 Q4 $15,685
2008 Q1 $17,544
2008 Q2 $17,092
Interesting times ahead.