LookSmart Emerges as a Leader in Internet Search Infrastructure; Sony Music Entertainment, Columbia TriStar Interactive are Newest Additions to LookSmart's Premier Partner List

Business Wire, Jan 14, 2000

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 14, 2000

LookSmart (Nasdaq:LOOK), a leader in Internet search and navigation infrastructure, today announced that it has added Sony Music Entertainment and Columbia TriStar Interactive to its list of premier search partners.

Sony Music Entertainment and Columbia TriStar Interactive are the latest leading companies to choose LookSmart to build highly integrated search and navigation solutions for their Web sites.

In the last year LookSmart has extended its network of Internet portals/media companies, access providers and affiliates with the addition of Microsoft, Excite@Home, British Telecom, Time Warner, and US West. The selection of LookSmart by these industry leaders validates the quality of LookSmart's robust suite of search and navigation products and its ability to generate incremental revenue opportunities for LookSmart and its partners.

"Sony Music Entertainment and Columbia TriStar Interactive's selection of LookSmart are two more endorsements by industry giants of the value of LookSmart's high quality search and navigation solutions," said Evan Thornley, co-founder and CEO of LookSmart. "Increasingly, companies are recognizing that search and navigation are integral components of their Internet strategies. LookSmart is best positioned to solve our partners and customers needs because we are all about helping the world find useful stuff quickly."

LookSmart has become the leader of Internet search and navigation infrastructure because it offers customers a robust suite of search and navigation products that are comprehensive, best-of-breed and flexible. Companies choose LookSmart because of its high quality and its technical ability to integrate rich proprietary content into relevant search results. LookSmart is the only provider of a complete and fully integrated search and navigation solution, including keyword, category and interactive search.

"Working with LookSmart will add new dimension to the sites we develop," said Fred Ehrlich, president, New Technology and Business Development, Sony Music Entertainment. "As a leading search infrastructure provider, LookSmart gives us access to a high quality and deep entertainment directory as well as the ability to integrate our own proprietary content, which is important to the growth of SME's Internet offerings."

"We felt LookSmart offered a thorough, well organized way to integrate search and directory solutions to compliment our existing Web properties. As content offerings continue to reach unprecedented growth levels, it is important that we provide our users with best of breed functionality which allows them to cut through the clutter and find exactly what they want," said John Matra, director of Business Affairs for Columbia TriStar Interactive.

It is the combination of LookSmart's proprietary technologies, partnerships with leading technology providers such as Inktomi, and through its team of "Webrarians" that organize and prioritize content that allows LookSmart to be an infrastructure leader of Internet search and navigation.

Through broadly distributing its search and navigation solutions, LookSmart has achieved massive scale. LookSmart's search and navigation solutions currently reach 45 million Internet users per month in the United States. The recently announced BT LookSmart joint venture will extend this reach by an additional 31 million Internet and wireless customers globally.

About LookSmart

LookSmart (Nasdaq:LOOK) is a leading online search and navigation company dedicated to helping the world find useful stuff quickly. LookSmart's search and directory service reaches over 45 million people a month -- nearly 70 percent of all Internet users in the U.S.

-- through LookSmart's Web properties and partner sites. LookSmart has launched sites for the U.S., the UK, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, Singapore and New Zealand, and built directories for Japan, Korea, and France, with directories for another seven countries in development.

LookSmart's content currently consists of over 1.5 million URLs organized into more than 100,000 categories, proprietary content from its search customers and access to the entire Web. LookSmart currently provides its navigation products to leading Internet portals, ISPs and Web sites including The Microsoft Network, Netscape Netcenter, Time Warner Inc., Excite@Home, British Telecom, US West, AltaVista, NetZero, over 280 Internet Service Providers, and 600,000 Web sites.

Through its partnership with Cox Interactive Media, LookSmart also offers one of the largest collections of quality local Web content in more than 70 U.S. markets. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and can be contacted at 415/348-7000 or visited at www.looksmart.com.