LookSmart Deactivates Wisenut.com

The index had not been updated for some time and traffic hovered around the 30,000 rank of sites worldwide for some years now so it's no real surprise that LookSmart shuttered Wisenut.


The "About Us" page offers the following message;

"We're sorry, but this site is no longer available.
Please visit www.looksmart.com to learn more
about other LookSmart products."

This action follows the sale of Grub.org to Wikia, the closing of Zeal.com with no explanation, the "fire sale" of Netnanny.com and the most recent removal of the vertical search sites.

As mentioned in the post below LookSmart revamped their home page this week. They demoted search to a tiny box lower left of the new page that returns results from their Findarticles site.

In other LookSmart news today Board president Ted West was promoted to (interim?) CEO. Along with compensation details was a healthy dose of verbiage including this quote;

"If during the term of your employment, there is a “Change of Control” event and (1) you are terminated without “cause” by the surviving corporation within twelve months after the Change of Control, or (2) you voluntarily resign for “good reason” within twelve months after the Change of Control, then all of your unvested Option Shares shall vest and become immediately exercisable." SEC Filing

I understand this is standard disclosure on SEC documents of this nature but it seems to me the company is polishing the fuselage for parking in a different hangar..

Disclosure; I own shares in LOOK but have no contact with anyone in the company and any speculations posted here are only that, speculation.

Update: Mashable and others caught the news 4 days after the fact!