Type LookSmart.com, and you'll find the search box on the left-hand column, almost as though search was a secondary interest. Only after typing in a query do you see LookSmart's main page, which has the industry-standard search box at the top with three labeled tabs beneath it: Directory, Web, and Articles. Clicking the Directory tab calls up a dozen category links (from Computing to Work & Money) at the very bottom of the page, while Articles takes you off LookSmart altogether and into a separate service called FindArticles (see below).
LookSmart's best attribute is its ability to scour periodicals for search terms. Using FindArticles (a LookSmart subsidiary), you can access more than 5 million articles. A simple query returns matching article titles, summaries, periodical names, and dates. You can filter your results by news category or by free or paid articles; for the premium stories, the site sends you content providers such as KeepMedia and Goliath.
Web searches on LookSmart are pretty basic. Besides the marked sponsored links, all you get are page titles, URLs, and snippets of text from the page. Unlike Google, LookSmart lacks related links, cached pages, aggregated images, and news links. Much better are the Directory results, which draw from LookSmart's database of cataloged Web sites, complete with site descriptions, related links, and categories (although still no cached pages). If you're looking for images, multimedia, Yellow Pages content, or local search info, you'll need to turn to another search site, such as Yahoo.
LookSmart doesn't have a downloadable toolbar, but it does have a clever service called Furl, which saves and archives any Web page you choose--sort of like your own, personal page cache. Using a special Furl toolbar, you can "Furl" a Web page with a single click, then call up or search the archived page at a later date, even after the original page has been updated. We were surprised to find that LookSmart doesn't have an online help section for searching (all of the other search engines in our roundup do), although there is one FAQ for FindArticles and another buried FAQ for Furl.