Sound bites:

John: What’s happening with search and this shift to a Web 2.0

David: if you watch what users do over the course of time you see users at first didn’t know what they were looking for.. now we see them now looking what they are looking for but things start to fall into a couple of categories: 1) know that they need a destination but not quite sure how to get to that destination and will use a Google and Yahoo who can provide a broad set of results and 2) what happens over the course of time is that people start to focus in on where they have a passion, a need, or a repetitive task and what they want in those things is that they want something that is essential not exhaustive. That is where Looksmart is focusing on where things are essential not exhaustive.

When searching with keywords users can get a couple of millions of results –that’s ok if your doing something for the first time but not if you’re doing something everyday .. two choices: continue to bookmark or start ot go to sites that you know will provide you what is essential verses what is exhaustive on a topic. That’s where we’re focused.

Looksmart has an algorithmic crawler and have combined the directory structure with the algorithmic. Example: launched three homework sites all deliver results but they are targeted toward different users (grammar school, middle school, and high school). Those users have different needs of results on the same keyword.

We’ve focused on vertical search by demographic and topic and it’s been great results and according to mediametrix audience has grown by 3 or 4 fold.

John: Where are you guys taking the search business with blogs and podcasting?

David: very important and because we’re not trying to form an opinion on something our job is to pull in as much relevant content both structured and unstructured so if there is something that will help our audience better accomplish a task that they have regardless of the type of content and where it comes from we want to make it available to them and to us it’s about building a community that uses our sites consistently.

John: It’s all about a community model

David: when I ran About.com we had sites that did 10m uniques a month and some that had 8 million uniques a month and both were valuable.

John: That’s telling. About.com pioneered the user generated content business. Isn’t the blogging market perfect for you.

David: that’s right and the marketplace has responded well to what we’re doing. The difference between us and About.com is that we are going to automate it.