the "thoughts of ceo david hills" ... genius !!

This was passed on to me this morning & is well worth the read. Particularly this 'excerpt' taken from within it.

Pay particular attention to the last sentence & then read it again !! - (Whilst it is a little long, it is all great reading for 'serious' investors and in view of recent 'happenings', it is highly reccomended reading)

"The five LookSmart vertical searches launched without ads, but Hills says the company will add them in time. And LookSmart will sell those ads itself; the company has a sizeable ad distribution network of 25,000 to 30,000 advertisers, and will soon begin placing those highly targeted ads on its owned-and-operated vertical properties, in addition to other publishers of Web pages."

(Not sure how 'old' this is ... but ...)

Yes, here is some great info on David Hill's plans for the verticals, plus more!!:

The trend towards vertical search, narrower than the big one-size-fits-all engines, and (presumably) more targeted got a little extra rocket fuel recently with LookSmart's decisions to carve five smaller search sites off of its main search platform.

Three of the five aim their content at students of various ages:

Teenja.com for teenagers.

GradeWinner.com for pre-teens.

And .....

24HourScholar.com for college students.

Two other new LookSmart (Vertical) search sites hope to appeal to parents:

ParentSurf, with a menu of general parenting resources.

and ....

GoBelle, directed specifically at active mothers.

At all these sites, visitors have a choice of searching the 1.5 billion documents of the Web that LookSmart's spiders crawl, or searching within the materials on its FindArticles.com property. FindArticles is a premium search engine that lets visitors look at published periodical content protected behind either firewalls or registration some of it whole, some of it in capsule form, but all of it free.

We are at the end of the day a search engine, says CEO Dave Hills. But from its beginning, LookSmart was also directory-focused. It was a vertical search company before the term arrived. LookSmart's primary search portal categorizes Web content into channels such as computing, entertainment, home and family, hobbies and reference.

What LookSmart has done now has been to combine the indexed Web content with its directories to produce the new vertical search spaces; these will then be maintained both by automation and some live editing. The aim is to get users of those search engines quickly to a range of information that is relevant to them but not overwhelming, in the way that 15 pages of Google search results might be. Essential but not exhaustive is the phrase Hills chooses to describe search results discovered through LookSmart's new sites.

Before coming to head LookSmart in October 2004, Hills served as president of media solutions for 24/7 Real Media, and before that as chief operating officer for About Inc., which owned the Web expert site About.com, where guides maintained pages on a range of subjects. He compares the process of carving out vertical search territory to a focusing decision at About.com.

When I got there we had about 750 guide sites, he says. In October 2001, we cut that back to about 450 sites and we only gave up about 6% of our audience. Every subsequent move at About.com to home in on what users really wanted to find out (as determined by tracking clicks and movement through the pages) showed a similar growth in traffic.

Hills became an advocate of the 'less is more' school of search provided the less was still properly relevant. Search on the Web is becoming increasingly personal and vertical, he says. People want to get to the content that matters to them, completely but quickly.” LookSmart itself has been through some turbulent changes recently, starting with MSN's decision to end a distribution deal with the search company in October 2003. Hills came on as CEO about a year later. By that time the company had bought a handful of Web technology providers such as filtering software provider Net Nanny and web archive service Furl.net. The company had also introduced a paid listings product, pared back its work force, and reorganized into two divisions:

consumer products and syndicated technologies.

In looking around for ways to reinvent the company, Hills tasked Deborah Richman, senior vice president of consumer services and another About.com veteran, with finding some pertinent vertical segments to target.

Users of FindArticles.com are primarily researchers and women, Hills says, so those groups seemed natural segments from the start. But Richman reported that the demographics could be further broken out by both age and purpose (family care versus self care).

The result for visitors is a handful of sites that can get them quickly to the information they want, whether it's Web research about Abraham Lincoln for a school paper or information on health spas and home businesses. For advertisers, we can deliver a highly targeted, highly qualified audience that just by virtue of the fact that they are using our site is passionate or has a particular need related to the topic, he says.

The five LookSmart vertical searches launched without ads, but Hills says the company will add them in time. And LookSmart will sell those ads itself; the company has a sizeable ad distribution network of 25,000 to 30,000 advertisers, and will soon begin placing those highly targeted ads on its owned-and-operated vertical properties, in addition to other publishers of Web pages.

And there's another revenue opportunity from these new vertical searches:

Syndicating search results to content publishers who may want to own their search users. Most publishers have ceded their search audience to either Google or Yahoo, Hill says. They take their results and offer their paid search advertising. As a result, they have no relation with the search advertiser, and they don’t have good site search or vertical search. Hills says LookSmart will go to these publishers and offer them a package that combines site search functions with the new LookSmart vertical search capabilities. If they choose, those publishers can also license an ad platform from LookSmart, in order to take charge of their own advertiser relationships.

The syndicated marketplace is going to assemble itself in time, he says.

Large publishers are going to grow increasingly wary of getting too close to Yahoo and Google. We're a very non-threatening alternative. We're not looking to cream off either their audience or their advertisers, because we believe we can make a really good living just by doing what we're doing.

Of course, for syndication and all the other revenue plans to come to pass, LookSmart's sites have to hit a bulls-eye with their demographic targets.

While the company is pretty confident that they’ve chosen some initial sweet spots among their FindArticles users, Hills says other verticals can and will be carved out in the coming weeks. We'll get a bunch of them out there and learn to drive audience to them, he says. LookSmart has begun sending out announcements of the sites to highly targeted publications that serve the proper audiences, creating awareness of the brand names and URLs for the sites. With that done, Hills team will begin doing search engine marketing for the sites. You don't want to try search engine marketing these services with zero brand awareness, he says, because users don't give a darn if they're never heard of you.”

Once they're launched and beginning to draw users, LookSmart's verticals will get the same oversight Hills and company gave About.com years ago:

Watch traffic, measure clicks, and re-design if necessary.

With any multiple-site destination on the Web, some will make it and some won't, he says. Some sites will turn out to be too broad, and some too small. So we'll ‘mess’ with them over time and make the changes as needed.

Thanks on behalf of ALL, to “Lookinsmart”. - Great Read ...

:)
LC