LookSmart too smart for its own good?

[Prentiss Riddle]

LookSmart, the Java-based web index backed by Reader's Digest, is
available as of this morning at:

	http://www.looksmart.com

My initial reaction is that LookSmart may be too smart for its own
good.  Here at Rice we have Java and Javascript turned off by default
for security reasons.  When I access LookSmart with Netscape 3.0, the
LookSmart opening page gives me the option of a Java-less version but
insists that I turn on Javascript.  It's not that the fundamental
architecture of LookSmart requires Java or Javascript, as I can use
LookSmart just fine from Lynx (their server apparently does client
detection and behaves differently for Lynx users).  But Netscape with
Javascript disabled gets me to a dead end.  

Even with Java and Javascript enabled, I don't see many features that
couldn't have been done without them.  Trying to read between the lines
at "http://www.looksmart.com/aboutus.html", I *think* LookSmart uses
Java and Javascript primarily to avoid re-sending information
duplicated from previous screens, in order to be friendlier to users
operating across slow modem lines.  A worthwhile goal, but not one that
requires making their service unusable by people who prefer their HTML
straight up, thank you.

But I've only started to explore LookSmart and maybe I'm missing some
other big win they get from Java and Javascript.

In terms of content, LookSmart seems to be pitching itself as a less
noisy competitor to Yahoo, with greater selectivity exercised over the
resources it chooses to list and with professionally-written abstracts
about each item.  That's where the connection to the Reader's Digest
name figures into their strategy:  Reader's Digest has been in the
"information filtering" business for a long time.  It will be
interesting to see whether LookSmart can stay ahead of the laws of
entropy or will ultimately suffer the same noisy fate as Yahoo.

-- Prentiss Riddle ("aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada") riddle at rice.edu
-- RiceInfo Administrator, Rice University / http://is.rice.edu/~riddle
-- Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of my employer.