WiseNut
NOTE: For a more recent overview of Wisenut, please refer to the current version of the Search Engine Yearbook.
WiseNut URLs
Main: http://www.wisenut.com/
Advanced Search: http://www.wisenut.com/WiseSearch/
Submission URL: http://www.wisenut.com/submitsite.html
Contact URL: http://www.wisenut.com/corp/contact.html
Physical address: 1333 Lawrence Expressway, Suite 269, Santa Clara, CA
95051
Phone number: 408-984-3831
Notes on WiseNut
Yet another Google challenger?
Debuting in beta in July 2001 and launching in September 2001, WiseNut has made quite a few waves in a very short time. Their biggest claim to fame is that impressive "1,571,413,207 Web pages and counting!" claim right at the top of the homepage.
But how reliable is that claim?
In our recent comparison of relative search engine database sizes, only Google and AltaVista returned more search results than WiseNut.
That puts the newcomer above old-timers like Excite, Lycos, Northern Light and AllTheWeb.
Duplicate entries
It seems their huge database contains some duplicate entries. That casts a huge shadow of doubt over both their 1.5 billion claim and their performance in our comparison of search engine database sizes. It's too soon to tell. At the time of writing, WiseNut is 3 months old - just learning to sit. Let's see how it crawls.
What else does it do?
Apart from a huge database, WiseNut offers very few extras.
WiseNut does have some search preferences. Here are the controls you can set from there:
· See 10, 20,
40, 50, or 100 hits at a time
· Include / exclude the summary
· Turn site clustering on or off
· Limit searches to one of 25 languages
· Choose encoding scheme
· Turn WiseGuide categories on or off
· Enable WiseWatch. (adult content filter)
Search relevancy
You guessed it. They incorporate link popularity. Here's what they have to say about it:
"WiseNut search results are more relevant. The patent-pending WiseRank™ relevancy ranking system is a revolutionary spam-proof way of using traditional text analysis and the structure of the Web to evaluate and rank pages. Its context-sensitive link analysis not only measures the relative importance of a given page, but also determines the relative relevancy of that page for a given query. In order to implement this complex and comprehensive measure of relevancy, WiseNut has developed ways to compute ranking algorithms significantly faster than the competition."
