LookSmart Launches 161 Vertical Sites

LookSmart has announced 161 vertical sites in 12 different categories. You can get to all the new categories at http://search.looksmart.com/; they categories range from vegetarian food to snow sports to open source.

If you pick a category from the front page you'll see that the category is further divided into many subcategories. Look to the left of the subcategory list and you'll see pointers to results from all LookSmart's resources, from shared pages, from articles, from blogs, from news, and from the Web. You also have the option to save your pages (via Furl) and see pages that other people viewing this section have looked at.

On the right you'll see pointers to "Top Articles" and "Web Picks." I would dearly love to know how these are determined. Are they picked from an editorial, or are those paid placements? It's not clear to me at all.

Drill down and you can get down to sub-sub-categories, which are basically links to searches of LookSmart's database. For kicks you can do searches that have nothing to do with that section and you will get results; I did a search for nanotechnology at LookSmart barbecue and grill and got results, but they were different results than the ones I got when I did a nanotechnology search at LookSmart Orlando.

I don't like the search results. I would like to see a size or a date of indexing. I like the fact that FindArticles are incorporated into the results; how about including article dates?

Another thing I don't see is a way to submit sites to these vertical directories. Does this mean that inclusion in one of these vertical directories is purely a case of paying for it? I'm not sure this is the best strategy for either building a great directory of sites or getting eyeballs. At the moment there's nothing here that really grabs me; I don't see a compelling reason here to use these vertical directories instead of the Open Directory, Yahoo's Directory (which isn't my favorite in the world either) or even a heavily-populated and very active tagging site like Del.icio.us.

There are things I like about the LookSmart family of sites -- FindArticles is a great, great resource and I use it constantly. But I don't know what to think about this relaunch. Does dividing up into a lot of different sections make it more relevant, a better bet for visitors than the original LookSmart Directory was? I guess I don't get it.

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