What LookSmart was, and where its listings came from
Calling LookSmart a search engine is a category error for most of its life. It was a human-compiled web directory — a categorised catalogue built by paid editors, and for a time by volunteers through its Zeal property — with no crawler of its own. Nothing on it was discovered by software. Sites were submitted, reviewed by a person, and filed into a subject hierarchy.
Its actual business was stranger and, for a while, cleverer than running a destination website. LookSmart wholesaled the directory to other people's portals. If you used Microsoft's MSN Search in the years around 2000 and saw a tidy list of categorised sites, you were looking at LookSmart's editorial work under someone else's brand. The company's insight was that the money was in supplying portals rather than being one.
There is exactly one period in which LookSmart owned a real web index: 2002 to 2007, after it bought the crawler-based engine WiseNut. It shut WiseNut down in late September 2007 on exiting consumer products, and from then on it was an advertising network — matching advertiser listings to queries and page content on partner sites, which is ad serving and not web search.
As of 19 August 2026 there is no consumer product at all. This is not a bankruptcy and not a clean shutdown: the corporate entity persists while the search engine has been gone for nearly twenty years.
Three technical eras, in order
1996–2002: the directory
No crawler. Editors reviewed and categorised submitted sites, and commercial sites paid a submission and review fee for consideration — paid inclusion, the model that made LookSmart its money and also made it controversial. On partner portals, LookSmart's editorial listings typically sat above algorithmic "deep" results supplied by a crawler-based partner such as Inktomi. Precisely which crawler partner supplied those fallback results, on which portal, in which year, varied by contract and is not reliably documented; treat any specific pairing sceptically unless it carries a contemporaneous citation.
2002–2007: WiseNut
LookSmart announced the acquisition of WiseNut on 12 March 2002, reported at around US$9.25 million, completing it in April. WiseNut was a genuine crawler with its own index and a result-clustering feature called WiseGuide, developed by a team led by Yeogirl Yun. It never achieved meaningful consumer traction. The user-agent string of its crawler is commonly reported as ZyBorg, but no primary LookSmart or WiseNut document confirming that could be found, so it should not be treated as established.
2007 onward: an advertising network
After the consumer exit there was no index of the open web at all. LookSmart matched advertiser listings to queries and content across partner sites. Whatever else that is, it is not a search engine, and pages that continued to list LookSmart alongside Google and Yahoo were describing something that had stopped existing.
Who ran it, and how it made money
LookSmart was founded in Melbourne, Australia in 1995 as Homebase, by Evan Thornley and Tracey Ellery, both formerly of McKinsey. It was renamed LookSmart on 28 October 1996. The Reader's Digest Association held a majority stake early on — reportedly around 80% for a US$5 million investment — before a 1998 leveraged buyout returned control to the founders. The Australian origin is routinely dropped from American accounts of the company; operations later centred on San Francisco, and recent filings list a base in Henderson, Nevada.
Revenue came from four places, in rough order of importance:
- Syndication and distribution licensing. The Microsoft agreement of early 1999 was the company. Wikipedia's account gives approximately US$30 million up front plus roughly US$5 million a year for five years of directory and listing services, and states that by August 2003 Microsoft accounted for something like 64–70% of company revenue. Those figures are Wikipedia-sourced and are given here as such.
- Paid inclusion into the edited directory — site owners paying for editorial review and listing. This is why early practitioners remember LookSmart badly: the line between editorial quality and paying to appear was thin, and the company was never able to argue convincingly that it was not.
- Pay-per-click and contextual advertising across a partner network, from 2003.
- Buying and selling adjacent businesses. FindArticles (launched 2000 with Gale Group, sold to CNET on 9 November 2007 for a reported US$20.5m); Net Nanny (bought April 2004 for a reported US$5.3m, sold to ContentWatch in January 2007); Furl (sold to Diigo in March 2009); Zeal, the volunteer directory (bought October 2000 for a reported US$20m, closed 2006). All per Wikipedia's article, and all reported rather than verified figures.
The Microsoft dependency, and what it cost
The most instructive thing about LookSmart is its balance sheet. It listed on NASDAQ on 20 August 1999 at US$12 a share, raising roughly US$92.4 million, and the stock peaked at around US$72 in March 2000. In 2003 the company reported revenue of US$140.9 million and net income of US$5.8 million. These are the numbers of a real business.
They were also the numbers of a business with one customer. On 6 October 2003 Microsoft announced it would not renew the MSN agreement. The stock reportedly fell 52.3% in a single day, to US$1.44; half the remaining staff were laid off that December. By 15 March 2005 the share price was US$0.85, and in January 2009 the market capitalisation was around US$28 million at US$0.14 a share. (Figures per Wikipedia's article, attributed rather than asserted.)
No standalone market-share figure for LookSmart exists — StatCounter's public series only begins in 2009, by which time the company had long left consumer search. What is documented is reach by proxy: because MSN displayed LookSmart's listings, the directory was in front of an enormous audience that LookSmart did not own. Losing the contract did not cost it a customer. It cost it the audience.
The long unwinding, and what is there today
The end was a contraction, not a collapse. Zeal, the volunteer directory, closed on 28 March 2006. In 2007 LookSmart exited consumer products: WiseNut was shut down in late September 2007 and FindArticles was sold to CNET that November. Michael Onghai became chief executive in February 2013, and the company acquired the assets of Syncapse Corp. that September for a reported US$3 million, moving into social analytics. In October 2015 assets were transferred into LookSmart Group, Inc., which merged with Maritime Technologies Corp. later that month; on 24 March 2017 LookSmart Group merged with its subsidiary LookSmart Capital Inc. and de-registered from SEC public reporting. Later ventures included an IT services business and a Phoenix data-centre project; whether any are currently trading is not established.
As of 19 August 2026, looksmart.com still resolves, to a small corporate site listing Michael Onghai as chief executive. There is no search product on it. Whether LookSmart Group, Inc. is in good standing in Nevada today, and whether the original Australian and UK entities were ever formally wound up, are open questions that a company-registry check would settle and that no accessible source answers.
Privacy, and the one documented controversy
There is no meaningful privacy question in 2026 because there is no consumer product collecting queries. Historically, LookSmart operated as an advertising network and used the standard cookie-based tracking of its era. No independent privacy audit and no regulatory action specific to its data handling could be found — which is not evidence of good practice, only an absence of reporting.
The closest thing to a documented scandal is not a privacy matter at all. In 2002 LookSmart converted the terms of its directory submission programme, moving site owners from flat-fee listings to a cost-per-click model, and faced a class action from small advertisers and website owners in 2002–03 as a result. The case name, court and settlement terms are not established in the accessible record, so the affair is recorded here in outline only. Its significance is reputational: LookSmart depended on the goodwill of the webmaster community for the content of its own directory, and it spent that goodwill.
On AI: LookSmart marketed itself in the 2010s as offering search, machine learning and chatbot technologies, but no consumer AI search product was ever shipped and none exists as of 19 August 2026.
What it got right, what it got wrong, and who it suits now
It was genuinely good at curating. In 1997–2000 a well-maintained human directory really was better than a poor crawler for browsing a subject, and LookSmart's editorial hierarchy was competently built. Its commercial read — that supplying portals beat being one — was correct for about four years and made real money.
It was bad at everything after that insight expired. It built no search technology of its own until it bought some in 2002, by which time Google had already won; concentrating roughly two-thirds of revenue in a single customer was a strategic failure visible to any analyst; and paid inclusion cost it credibility with the people supplying its content. The company effectively died the day Microsoft left, and then took another decade to stop moving.
Nobody should use LookSmart, because there is nothing to use. Any page presenting it as a live search engine, a directory worth being listed in, or a marketing channel is around two decades out of date. One practical warning follows from that: offers to place a site in the LookSmart directory are still circulated, and since neither the directory nor the paid-inclusion programme has existed since the 2000s, such offers are fraudulent. Selling access to dead directories is a persistent scam that trades on exactly this kind of stale listing.
Common misconceptions
- "LookSmart was a search engine." For most of its life it was a directory — human editors, no crawler. It owned a crawler-based engine only from 2002 to 2007, and that engine was WiseNut.
- "LookSmart was Microsoft's search engine." It supplied directory listings to MSN under contract. Microsoft's own crawler-based engine, which became Bing, came later; MSN's algorithmic results during the LookSmart years came from other partners.
- "LookSmart was an American company." It was founded in Melbourne, Australia, and only later centred on San Francisco.
- "LookSmart went bankrupt." Not according to the public record. It shrank, sold assets piecemeal, delisted and de-registered — a slow contraction into a holding company. Writing "went bankrupt" without a court record is wrong.
- "You can still submit a site to LookSmart." No. The directory and the paid-inclusion programme are long gone, and anyone selling submission to them is running a scam.
- "LookSmart owned DMOZ." No — the Open Directory Project was Netscape's, later AOL's. LookSmart's volunteer directory was Zeal, a separate and smaller thing, closed in 2006.
Most of the dates and figures on this page come from Wikipedia's article on LookSmart, with corroboration for the MSN deal and the 2003 collapse in Search Engine Journal's timeline of the company's first decade.
Frequently asked questions
Is LookSmart still a search engine?
No. LookSmart has had no consumer search product since it exited consumer services in 2007 and closed the WiseNut index that September. As of 19 August 2026 looksmart.com resolves to a small corporate site listing Michael Onghai as chief executive, with no search function. The company was never formally wound up, so "the company exists, the search engine does not" is the accurate description.
Did LookSmart have its own crawler?
Only for five years. From 1996 to 2002 LookSmart was a human-edited directory with no crawler at all — editors reviewed submitted sites and filed them into categories. It acquired the crawler-based engine WiseNut in March and April 2002, which gave it a genuine index of its own, and shut that down in late September 2007. Before and after those dates, no crawler.
What happened between LookSmart and Microsoft?
From early 1999 LookSmart supplied categorised directory listings to Microsoft's MSN Search under a distribution agreement reported at around US$30 million up front plus roughly US$5 million a year. By August 2003 Microsoft reportedly accounted for 64–70% of LookSmart's revenue. On 6 October 2003 Microsoft announced it would not renew, and LookSmart's stock reportedly fell 52.3% in one day.
Was LookSmart an Australian company?
It was founded in Melbourne in 1995 as Homebase, by Evan Thornley and Tracey Ellery, and renamed LookSmart on 28 October 1996. The Reader's Digest Association took a majority stake early before a 1998 buyout returned control to the founders. Operations later centred on San Francisco and recent corporate filings list Henderson, Nevada, but the origin was Australian.
Can you still submit a website to the LookSmart directory?
No, and offers to do so are fraudulent. The edited directory and its paid-inclusion programme ended along with LookSmart's consumer business in the 2000s, and the Zeal volunteer directory closed on 28 March 2006. Selling submission to directories that no longer exist is a long-running scam that relies on out-of-date pages still listing those directories as live.
What was WiseNut?
WiseNut was a crawler-based search engine with its own index and a result-clustering feature called WiseGuide, developed by a team led by Yeogirl Yun. LookSmart announced its acquisition on 12 March 2002 at a reported US$9.25 million and completed it in April. It is the only web index LookSmart ever owned. It never gained consumer traction and was closed in late September 2007.
Did LookSmart go bankrupt?
Not on the public record. What happened was a contraction: the Microsoft contract lapsed in 2003, staff were cut, Zeal closed in 2006, WiseNut and FindArticles went in 2007, and the company delisted and then de-registered from SEC reporting on 24 March 2017 after a series of mergers. That is a slow unwinding into a holding company, not a bankruptcy.