Furl Search Client Acquired By LookSmart
LookSmart, an Internet search company, today announced the acquisition of Furl.net, an innovative service that enables users to save a full-text copy of any page on the Web, then search and share that data. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Furl allows members to simply and securely save copies of online articles, product information, electronic receipts, favorite Web sites and other interesting or important pages. Members can instantly find what they need by searching their personal archive and the entire Web, through the Furl toolbar or directly at Furl.net, from any computer. Furl also provides many options to share and discover compelling information via email subscriptions, RSS feeds, blog integration and personalized recommendations.
“Furl’s technology and desktop toolbar are a perfect fit with LookSmart’s search strategy,” said Kevin Krim, vice president of Web properties for LookSmart. LookSmart plans to maintain Furl.net as a free service, generating revenue from relevant sponsored listings on search and content pages. The company will leverage its advertising and search resources to build on Furl.net’s already compelling features. “To that end, we’re pleased to announce that we’re providing 5 gigabytes (GB) of storage for each user’s public archive, enough for tens of thousands of archived and searchable items.”
Search Engine Watch’s Chris Sherman reviews Furl:
“Furl combines the best features of a bookmark manager and a weblog with your own, permanent online cache of web pages — and makes them searchable, to boot.
Furl (“file URL”) is a promising new service that’s unlike any other I’ve come across. It solves the “disappearing bookmark” problem — pages that for one reason or another vanish, making your bookmarks useless. It does this by actually storing a copy of the page for you on Furl’s own servers.
It also makes these pages searchable — something that programs like SurfSaver also let you do. The key difference is that Furled pages are accessible from any web-connected computer, while SurfSaver pages are for the most part available only on your local hard disk.”
