The 150 year old French publishing company Larousse opened its new site a few days ago. The site immediately was overwhelmed by the number of interested visitors, but became available again yesterday. As I write this on a Saturday morning in Europe, the site is up but not as responsive as we've come to expect from search and reference sites. One of the reasons this is of interest is that although this site is in French only, Larousse is owned by Lagardère which owns French, English and Spanish language media outlets. An experiment by Lagardère is no laughing matter. It may turn out to be the wave of the future, where traditional media "gets it".

I explored the site, which chose Microsoft .NET technology on IIS 6 for some reason, is very slow and erratic, but when it does work, here are a few features I think are of interest.

Doing a search on a word or name brings up a multi-paned results page. On the left are expandable panes for article links, quotations, timelines, multimedia objects including images, video and sound files. On the right, member-contributed articles are listed. For example, the name "Obama" does not have a Larousse article but there is a member-written contribution on the right, "Obama, Illinois Prodigy".

There appear to be social networking features such as "community" planned but not yet available. There are thematic alerts, but are there keyword alerts like those on Google or Yahoo? That would be important for brand watching. Bookmarking is another feature that isn't on at the moment.

The site currently suffers from ajaxmania, so the search field sometimes misses the first letters of the word and login buttons don't always work, requiring a full reload and a lot of patience. Also, the stats metering slows the site down. All in all, I do not believe that adequate technical resources were aligned with this effort. Perhaps it has had more success than the budget committee expected or the developers don't have the experience on such potentially busy sites?

Coincidentally, I see an offer for full access to Larousse publications online "starting at" 1 euro per month. Features promised are access to the 4 bilingual dictionaries, the full Larousse dico in French and the entire encyclopedia. The bilinguals with English will certainly be of interest to many who have found by experience that the free translations and dictionaries available on line are pretty spotty in quality. Still, paid online access in trad media has not shown itself to be all that commonly successful.