Looksmart is both a proprietary search technology and a human compiled directory of web sites. It gathers its listings in two ways. Commercial sites pay to be listed in its commercial categories, making the service very much like an electronic Yellow Pages. However, volunteer editors at the LookSmart owned Zeal Directory also catalog sites into non-commercial categories for free.

Though Zeal is a separate web site, its listings are fully integrated into LookSmart's results.

LookSmart History

LookSmart launched independently in October 1996, was backed by Reader's Digest for about a year and then company executives bought back control of the service.

LookSmart also bought the WiseNut crawler-based search engine in April 2002. WiseNut is offered through LookSmart through the web tab above their search box. Unlike its competitors, the WiseNut crawler has often been out of date for months at a time.

Finally, the real gem at LookSmart can be found via its articles tab that provides access to content from thousands of periodicals.

LookSmart Web Properties

• LookSmart ... www.looksmart.com
• WiseNut ... www.wisenut.com
• Find Articles ... www.findarticles.com
• LookListings ... http://listings.loolsmart.com
• Zeal ... www.zeal.com
• Grub ... www.grub.org

LookSmart Search

LookSmart provides partners and search users with industry leading search results through the unique combination of proprietary search technology, a web index and a professionally edited directory.

LookSmart's proprietary search technology, branded under the trade name of WiseNut, makes use of textual analysis of hyperlinks, web page popularity, user feedback, and editorial input to provide search results with industry-leading relevance.

Integrating a traditional centralized crawling framework and a paradigm-shifting distributed crawling model, LookSmart has built WiseNut into one of the web's largest web search engines, including 2.5 billion URLs and 1.1 billion indexed documents.

LookSmart's editorial directories span 33 geographic markets and 13 different languages, with more than four million web sites organized into 300,000 categories. Professional editors in five offices around the world collaborate with a global community of tens of thousands of volunteers to build superior, searchable content.

LookSmart Website Submission

LookSmart's listings are distributed to other search engines, so it is worth while to get your website listed.

To submit your website to the LookSmart non-commercial directory categories for free you have to go to Zeal.com and register first, then log in and add your web site.

LookSmart owns Zeal, which uses volunteer editors to catalog the web, and incorporates the Zeal non-commercial listings into its own directory.

Your submission to the non-commercial categories at Zeal must be for content that is truly non-commercial in nature. If you attempt to submit something that is actually commercial, it will be rejected.

Once you've registered with Zeal and passed the subsequent member test, you can then submit your site to the non-commercial category you've selected by using the Manage option near the top of the category page and the using Add a Site Profile link near the top of where web sites are listed.

Before submitting your web site to Looksmart, scan the Looksmart directory to find the most appropriate category. Make sure your title and description does not exceed 35 and 145 characters respectively. Then fill out the form and submit your web site. You can resubmit to other categories about every 6 weeks.

LookSmart LookListings CPC Inclusion Service

LookListings lets you tailor your message to customers for specific keywords and reach a broader audience with LookSmart's relevancy-based inclusion targeting ... all at the same time.

LookSmart has emerged as one of the most important marketing partners for acquiring new customers online. We anticipate that LookSmart will remain a key component in the marketing efforts of any effective web site promotion for the foreseeable future.

Get Listed with Look Smart

LookSmart Small Business Listings

LookListings for Large Accounts

Zeal Add URL Process. Zeal is an increasingly important part of the LookSmart Network, offering free listings to non-commercial and not-for-profit web sites.

The thing to remember is that you must have suitable URL content and be engineered to beat your competition within Looksmart before you register your pages. Just registering with Looksmart does not assure a suitable ranking.

Please take note ... last year LookSmart announced to submitters that their accounts were being 'upgraded' to what they were calling their 'Small Business Express' model.