Search engine leader Looksmart (www.looksmart.com) announced on September 23 the acquisition of Furl.net (www.furl.net), a web page clipping and archiving service. Furl allows users to save the full text of web pages in their own personal archive. Users can annotate pages, organize them into folders, and most importantly, search the contents of their archive to locate information that they have saved. Rather than being desktop-based, such as the new Copernic Desktop, Furl serves as an online repository accessible through any Internet connected computer.
Planned enhancements include the addition of web search into the Furl interface, as well as the ability to search the archives of other Furl users. Looksmart also plans to leverage Furl users' behavior to create new types of relevance algorithms for web search. Separately, Looksmart has integrated web search into its NetNanny 5.1 web filtering software. The search engine is based on a LookSmart-powered search index, presumably drawing from the Wisenut crawler the company purchased several years ago.
Mike Giles, founder of Furl.net, said that Furl is really about personal search and about saving data, and that there has been so much focus on search on the Internet and very little emphasis on what users do with that data when they find it. Kevin Krim, vice president of Web properties for LookSmart, said that LookSmart will use the information that it is gleaning from people's furling activities to create a new ranking methodology, which will be similar to Google's PageRank, but rather than using the link structure of the web to determine the importance of the document, searcher behavior will be paramount.
