Wired News Report on Looksmart

[rubble88]

Title: "Seething Over the Search for Cash"

From the article, "But there are apparently still some practices that are frowned upon in the all's-fair world of search, and LookSmart -- the directory company that provides listings for some of the Internet's biggest search engines, including MSN Search -- is being accused by webmasters and search engine experts of biting the hand that fed them."

Full-Text at:
[wired.com...]

[martinibuster]

Great article.

[mcguffin]

Wired News:

On obscure Web forums dedicated to discussing the nuances of search

Are we obscure, or is the author talking about a different forum? :)

[vitaplease]

Actually a good and simple explanation of the Looksmart move.

So my site has monthly MSN periods.

I have indeed seen the actdumb discussion on a less wired forum. I will have to look up "obscure" in Google's new glossary tool.

[backus]

One word - Screwed!!!

[buckworks]

The article talks about LookSmart launching a "fairly standard pay-per-click listing service" -- I could thing of some rather rude things to say about that but I'll restrain myself to factually pointing out the following:

In any other pay-per-click listing service I would have
* control over which terms my traffic was coming from
* control over the description that was being shown to potential visitors
* the freedom to raise or lower my bids according to the value of the traffic.

A writer who calls LookSmart a "fairly standard pay-per-click service" is sadly uninformed.

[skibum]

It's good to see some press about this. Finally.

".......Because of this high price, in fact, Crawford said that he would actually like MSN to drop LookSmart and use another, cheaper listing service -- which can't be a good sign for LookSmart, since Crawford is quoted in the company's latest press release as being one of LookSmart's happiest customers......."

[WindSun]

There are about 10 major mistakes an SE could do - and L$ made at least 9 of them.

The sad thing about it all is that the ones most affected - the users of MSN/L$ - don't even realize they are getting tainted and skewed results from their searches. Or at least they did not used to, but perhaps they are catching on, judging by the steady growth of the use of Google as most people's SE of choice.

One funny thing - we have at least 3 listings still in L$ that were put in there years ago that still show up. There is little doubt that if we paid them now, we would be trading those 3 free "grandfathered" ones for one crappy paid one. I am sure they would be removed.

Right now they almost HAVE to leave most of the old sites in there, or it would strip their listings down by 90% or more and they would be reduced to a skeleton.