The focus of LookSmart so far, has been to provide it's directory results to other search sites and portals.
In what could be considered a wise move, LookSmart will now compete with Inktomi, Fast and Google in providing search engine results as well , to large portals like AOL and MSN, who have in the past used the LookSmart directory listings, combined with search engine results from Inktomi.
The former CTO and co-founder of mySimon, Yeogirl Yun, launched WiseNut in September, 2001, and have already expanded their reach through a joint venture in Korea — Korea WiseNut — already one of Korea's top ten sites.
With this new takeover, it will be interesting to see the eventual effect on Google, who have had tremendous success so far, especially after Yahoo began using the Google search engine results in preference to the Inktomi results.
WiseNut has been labled as a strong rival to the Google search engine, and with this acquisition by LookSmart in a stock transaction valued at $9.25 million, Evan Thornley, chairman and CEO of LookSmart says that "By acquiring WiseNut, LookSmart becomes the first company to have both high quality scalable search technology and strong listings revenue generation. We believe this will position us to compete with companies that have only one of these capabilities."
With this new move, LookSmart's partners will now benifit with a more relevant search experience, as well as the benifit to LookSmart's directory customers, who in turn should benefit from a higher return on marketing investment, as more relevant search results drive more qualified leads. So far, LookSmart is the only company that provides both pay-for-placement and paid inclusion search listing platforms, aimed towards the bigger advertisers.
About the Author
Cyrus currently manages a few web sites, the most recent of which is PromotionData.com a community center for site promotion and web development, located at http://www.promotiondata.com/