LookSmart
With a team of live Webrarians and directory of 200,000 categories, LookSmart might have been expected to score higher than it did. Unfortunately, a handful of weaknesses hurt this site's score.
Search results may include a directory category and ways to refine searches, followed by reviewed and relevant sites. But beware: You get links to LookSmart sponsors first, including faux results such as Use your NextCard to buy Federated States of Micronesia when you search for the country. Another annoyance is that URLs aren't displayed, which makes judging result relevance quickly difficult.
For the most part, LookSmart's results are on the mark, especially with multiword queries and travel-related searches. Look Smart's main weakness, however, is that, as with Lycos, there seems to be no way to exclude terms from a search. Boolean operators don't work, and no advanced search option exists. One way to work around this is to explore LookSmart's directory by topic.
Although LookSmart is not equipped for natural-language queries, Look-Smart Live! can help. Submit a question and you'll be notified via e-mail when another Live! user answers it. Of course, that eliminates the instant gratification most of us expect from the Web. The correct answer to the question "Who wrote The Remains of the Day?" was sent to us 16 hours after we submitted it -- and then four more times over the next two days.
Direct Link: LookSmart
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