How not to win friends and .......

[Mel]

Hi All:

Have any of you been following the hooplah over at Zeal since they were bought out by Looksmart?

Seems like they have dumped all the old Zealots but said if they were nice and submitted some more sites to the directory they would let them back in after passing a test!

They have also dumped a lot of their database and so it seems that they are almost starting from scratch again. Relevancy seems to me to be close to zero and when you do get results you have to look through ten or twelve different categories they present the search results under to find what you want.

When I heard that they were going to be under Looksmart, I though they might have a future and/or it might be the elusive back door into LS, so I submitted my sites to them. They sent me back an email that they were accepted on July 19, but going to the sites today that they said they were accepted results in this message:

"Sorry, that page isn't available.
Zeal has recently relaunched, and several pages of the site have been discontinued.

Please go to www.zeal.com to find what you're looking for."

I don't know about others but this seems like a strange way to run a search engine>

[ihelpyou]

Yes, I agree with you.

I do know they are completely redoing things and are in beta right now. They have not actually relaunched yet.

I do not know about having to become a zealot again.

[MsSearch]

I had, at one time, signed up to be a zealot...before they became a part of Looksmart. I also thought that it may have been a backdoor into Looksmart.

I recently got an email from them to check out the new site. My login and password still worked but i had to take a 20 question test...once passing that test and gaining some experience, there is apparently another test....Does anyone else find this a bit strange??

As for sites listed...all my sites that got accepted into Looksmart are listed in Zeal.

[ihelpyou]

Yes. My sites submitted to LS are in Zeal also. They must have just added them to it.

Something is going to happen, just not sure what yet. Will be interesting.

[Hope]

Before they changed things, actually 2 weeks ago, I was an editor in 6 categories. I logged in yesterday and I had no points and no cats. I had to take the tests again. I am not happy over it either, but I am playing their game.

I recieved the email yesterday. What bothers me is the fact that some editors already have 20,000-50,000 points. It seems like not all the editors lost thier points or cats.