Look.com

Positives and Negatives - how this search engine can become a player?

[penfold25]

Been in contact with the owner of this site and he is looking for some feedback from Webmasterworld users on positive and negative aspects of the search engine.

He is commited to improving it and being considered somewhat of significant in the future, any ideas of how to improve it? What could be changed, deleted?

I think with good branding and capitalization it could definitely have some great possibilities.

(the box search portion is being rewritten for Oct 1)

What do you's think?

[Dave_A]

Hi I have just visited www.look.com and for my point of view the opening page was too busy and took an age to download.
I run and own a search engine in New Zealand off topic and I have found that if the page doesn't load very quickly visitors go elsewhere. I get around 100,000 hits an hour and if the opening page contains too much it can drain the server and increase it's bandwidth too much.
Look.com is a very good search area but it may take people to long to find what they are looking for?
Many people these days are not wanting to be bombarded with adverts and gimmics they really want to just find what they want and wizz off.
Perhaps I would suggest that some of the adverts should be cut back and just let the visitor find what they want more easily.
My search engine is still quite small, I have a searchable index of around 30,000 New Zealand based web sites and I use a php web spider to index web sites, my opening page only takes around a second to open and then it's down to the visitor to "Search!" what they want.
The thing is that a search engine doesn't need to have it's keywords and metatags set up very well, people visit you to find everyone else, so you don't have to have your web site set up to attract search engines because you are one.

That is my advice if you want to make it work better.

I wish you the best in your venture.
Dave Andrews

[edited by: DaveAtIFG at 4:49 am (utc) on Sep. 21, 2004]

[zomega42]

Same here, it took forever to load. And the graphics at the top look funny.

[mathguy]

A couple things. First the homepage is too heavy. The advertising seems to get in the way too much. This seems to be an example of too much advertising. On popular search terms you have to go down a couple pages before you get to the organic results. It's good for revenue to have the sponsored links prominently listed but if the user has to go down too many pages to find something that isn't an ad you are going to have trouble getting people to use the engine with any regularity. I would probably suggest look.com to get down to no more than 2-3 ppc providers. It seems like the site would be better off with 2-3 decent providers instead of some of the no name companies they have partnered with.

Minor quibble but the odp clone is lacking proper notice on the page.

[willybfriendly]

I did a niche search. Only 6 of the top 20 sites were "unique". All were paid listings, and just repeated over and over. Relevance was poor. And, one of the results simply sent me to another page of paid results, under the guise of the "Best Widget Directory".

If he is serious about getting serious, he should probably start with the results.

WBF

[penfold25]

This is Quoted from the Owner who i have shown this thread, he has replied with the below response.

Thank you everyone for the advice and help. I am encouraged that the things I wish to do on the box search is what you all think should happen. I will be peppering paid and organic to keep money flowing and keep people coming back.

It is a very hard balance and my ex-poartner and I fought alot on how pure to be about searches and how pragmatic to be about revenue.

Question back I have is those who are into organics "so much" how do they make money? repeated need to be filtered I know, not currently happening, but will soon.

I can strip out all the banners or some but everything commercail removed lowers revenue. Balance needs to found, clearly I am currently over the top in groups view, accepted.

Does anyone make a business full time of search engines for profit?

If I provide only a search box, then google will always be faster and deeper so then I might as well close up shop. Yahoo model is what I feel worth following again revenue thinking is biggest thought for me.

Sorry about being mercenary but I am. Anyone suggest way to make more money, new box search come back and see mid-Oct and please recomment. Thanks for the itme.

[AdjumperGuy]

Page load was pretty fast, but the search results were not what I expected. I agree with willybfriendly : relevance is extremely poor.

[christopher]

Not bad, lot's of buttons and links to press etc, but it's a bit too 'kiddy and fun' for me. It looks like it's been designed for young children - it's that sort of style..

Needs a colour change.

[neo_brown]

Too many sponsored results.
I appreciate that you need to make money and Im no expert, but I would imagine its gonna be tough to get anyone to use an engine that offers no improvement to what is already available or is in fact not as good as what is already available with regards to relevant results.
Why would people use your engine above any of the others which are far more visible?
If your search was part of a portal that got loads of hits then it might make sense financially, otherwise I cant see how it would.

[christopher]

The sponsered ads seem to only appear if you selects the tabs at the top?

like: Site Features, Humour, Financials and Extras etc - but it's pretty free of them when a 'normal search' is done. In some places it's a bit too colourful and overcrowded.

I've got very mixed feelings about this one, I reckon it's a search facility trying to be a big looking portal, but fails in the portal department, kind of like MSN does. Although MSN has better partners (obviously), but is still a long way from Yahoo.

You need tons of cash to become a portal, and a few tickers and feeds here and there ain't going to fool anyone. Shame really - just another engine cash grabber me thinks!

[nate_king1]

Yes make the page less ads/graphics. Also take a couple of ads on the 'Search' page. Just my 2 cents

[christopher]

Like all these General engines, will they have staying power or will they fade away into the sunset?

[nigritude]

really need to make the results relavant I looked up a website and found 10 results that pulled in the name dynamically that had nothing to do with the site. this site was built for ads not users