Company Overview

 Founded in 1995 by the Australian husband and wife team of Evan Thornley and Tracey Ellery, LookSmart is a category-based Web directory with more than 2.5 million Web address listings indexed in more than 250,000 categories. The company, which is pushing itself primarily as a target-marketing tool for advertisers, still gets a good chunk of its revenue from listing fees. LookSmart also operates FindArticles.com, an online compilation of more than 5 million articles culled from newspapers, magazines, and academic journals; Furl.net, an online bookmark service; and Net Nanny, publisher of family-friendly filtering software. The company suffered a major setback in 2004 when Microsoft ended its licensing deal, which accounted for roughly 65 percent of its revenue.