A recently launched search engine called 100.com has joined the ranks of LookSmart. The partnership calls for LookSmart to provide directory listings and bid-for-placement distribution network in its search results.
Because 100.com has a strict relevance policy, paid placement listings will only account for 4% of the search results provided by 100.com. The industry’s newest search engine was launched in May 2004 with the intentions of competing with the search giants like Yahoo and Google, et al. 100.com was designed to function as a meta search engine.
The portal provides 60 top categories, under which search terms have been indexed, with each edited and ranked to provide the 100 most relevant Web sites for each of those categories. The site also provides a news service, which includes hundreds of categories. This will provide news for leading topics as well as each major city, country and region in the world.
Users are able to customize 100.com. They can select their individual preferences for colors, layout, headlines, weather, personal link manager, calendar, diary and even foreign exchange rates.
“We are not concerned with trying to deliver thousands of results for each term, as the traditional search engines do, primarily because our efforts will be in delivering the most useful and relevant results in the 100 we provide,” McEvoy said. “In any event our research tells us that 95% of users don’t go past the first 20 or 30 results before finding what they are looking for. By focusing on the relevancy and limiting the number of search results, we hope to deliver quicker searches as well.”
Chris Richardson is a search engine writer and editor for murdok. Visit murdok for the latest search news.
