This morning, I had an e-mail notice from Furl founder Mike Giles announcing that Furl has just been acquired by the online search firm LookSmart. Giles says that this will not affect Furl’s service negatively at all, and that the service will remain free. The good news is that they’re bumping storage space for Furl archives up to 5 gig per user. (Not bad!)
Honestly, I don’t know much about LookSmart at the moment, so I have no idea how to read between the lines on this yet. I’d love to hear readers’ perspectives on what this deal might mean for Furl junkies like me. Feel free to comment on this below.
This morning I came in to work to an email from Mike Giles, most notable for his comments on my site and founder/CEO of Furl.net. In the email, he explains that Furl has been purchased:
Tomorrow we will be making an official announcement that Furl …
Search Engine Watch has an article that goes over allot of this at this link.
They also have a short blog posting on it.
As a recent Furl convert, I was disappointed to receive the email. I read that Looksmart will be incorporating Furl users choices into their search engine ranking which sounds like a good iea, but how long will it be before it’s exploited by webmasters. I have found some great sites by browsing other users choices, and I fear that’s what we’ll lose.
i don’t think the purchase will affect much on FURL. the impact should be on looksmart. it’s all about how looksmart will integrate the social and bookmark functions on their search engine. for example, if i were them, i will show furl popularity on the search result (e.g. how many people bookmark this site) and have a quick link for people to bookmark it.
A good integration will allow them to challenge a9 or yahoo.
Yet another post from me as I stumble through the links. I came to Furl via LookSmart, while using FindArticles. I have used FindArticles on and off for a year or so, and have liked what I’ve seen. So it was nice to have Furl right there waiting for me to sign up and play with.
I want to add that Furl reflects a wider popularity of links. The same five items show up at the top of other link management systems. It is pretty clear that the global rank of a given site will be reflected across all such systems.