LookSmart today announced that its board of directors has appointed Gary Wetsel as a member of the board on September 15, 2004.

HighBeam Research announced today a new agreement with LookSmart that makes more than one million premium articles from the HighBeam Research Library archive accessible via LookSmart’s FindArticles service.

LookSmart today announced that CEO Damian Smith and CFO Bill Lonergan will present to the investment community at the Kaufman Brothers Communications, Media and Technology Conference.

Vivisimo, provider of clustering and meta-search software, and LookSmart, a leader in search, announced in the industry’s first clustering search feed, which will dramatically improve click-through rates and increase revenue generation capabilities for Web sites.

Search engine LookSmart has released their second quarter financial report of 2004. The report finds that they have exceeding announced company expectations. LookSmart reported revenue of $21.3 million for the second quarter 2004, which is ahead of its prior guidance of $18.0 million to $20.0 million. This includes $1.7 million of revenue from MSN and $2.2 million of revenue from discontinued international operations.

A recently launched search engine called 100.com has joined the ranks of LookSmart. The partnership calls for LookSmart to provide directory listings and bid-for-placement distribution network in its search results.

The Cal Athletic Department announced a partnership with California based search engine LookSmart to develop a branded search engine for the Cal Athletics department that will support the university’s athletic programs. This partnership will also provide search services for students and alumni.

Search engine LookSmart announced yesterday that it had acquired the rights to NetNanny for approximately $5 million in cash and stocks. NetNanny is an online filter used for filtering out websites that have questionable or adult content.

Vice President of LookSmart, Dakota Sullivan, is apparently a very busy man. Nevertheless, he finally took time out to be interviewed by Web Rank CEO Kalena Jordan. In the interview, Mr Sullivan reveals how the Yahoo/Inktomi deal will affect LookSmart, the new features LookSmart will be introducing for Small Business Listings customers shortly and why he thinks WiseNut is a better search engine partner for the major portals than Google:

Looksmart has entered a deal with Microsoft allowing MSN to at times display Looksmart results.

LookSmart released their revenue forecast for the first quarter on Thursday, March 11, 2004. They raised their first quarter revenue estimates from $16 to $21-$23 million.

The past year has been one of major transition in the search engine industry. Changes to the landscape have been enormous with mergers, acquisitions, and the easing of several formerly big-players out of the sector or, in the case of AltaVista, Lycos and LookSmart, into the minor leagues. We’ve seen new technologies and revenue models being tested by search firms, along with fresh promises of personalized ad-delivery through contextual placement. While there is no end in sight for changes in this evolving medium, this is a good time to examine the impact of such upheaval on the state of website marketing and search engine placement.

Part of the overall process of submitting one’s website to the search engines is getting your site listed in the top directories. Directories are different from standard search engines in that a search engine will query a database of indexed websites before it produces results and a directory is a database of websites that have been arranged by subject. Directories do indeed have search functions but the websites are still listed in specific categories of which one may search by drilling through the various subjects the directory offers.

After noticing the LookSmart directory results still in MSNsearch, I wrote to the guys at LookSmart to get some details.

Question: Since registering with LookSmart and paying $400 for the link, we have had significantly less enquiries than before we paid for the listing.
We manufacture a woodburning machine, which we have sold throughout Australia and overseas. We feel that we made the wrong decision to pay for the listing and your advice would be appreciated.

LookSmart, a business that harnesses the power of search to generate cost-effective sales leads, announced yesterday a series of enhancements for its Small Business Listings service. The new features, which include upgraded tracking, expanded reporting, more flexible listing management and reduced fees, will make it easier for small business customers to manage and optimize their paid search listing campaigns on the LookSmart Network.

One of my favorite “scams that won’t die” are the companies that drop SPAM into my inbox every week offering to submit my website to “thousands” of search engines for the low low price of $20 a month.

LookSmart is a global leader in Internet search and categorisation, operating a database of three million URLs organised into 300,000 categories. Its influence is far reaching, yet a succession of recent changes to its paid inclusion program has left the directory misunderstood and widely criticised. In order to understand these changes, LookSmart’s future direction and the impact of these changes to website marketing, we must first understand a bit about the structure of LookSmart itself, and it’s relationships with a string of strategic partners.

LookSmart was the first major player to introduce paid inclusion, and as a result developed an early skew towards the corporate sector of the web. Measures were taken during 2001 to counteract this through the integration of Zeal’s community based website directory , which doubled the number of non-commercial sites within the LookSmart database overnight – and continues to feed non-commercial content into the directory. This gave website marketers the opportunity to submit content to LookSmart for free. Becoming a Zealot involves a few online tests, but means that you can edit your own non-commercial listings that will be distributed throughout the LookSmart Network.

On April 9th, Looksmart publicly announced to the world that they had, as of that day, made the transformation from human edited directory, to a pay-per-click search engine. Shortly after, we also received a phone call from them explaining that since our company SubmitExpress.com is a valued partner of LookSmart they wanted to tell us about their new program first hand. They spent about half hour with us going over the details of the new program and also informed us that we will no longer receive commissions on referrals to them though our site and were asked to remove their banners.

As many of you may know, Fredrick Marckini is the founder and CEO of iProspect.com, one of the country’s leading search engine positioning companies.