LookSmart has quietly relaunched its Wisenut search engine, bolstering its technology and refreshing its index with a brand new crawl of the web.
Last year, Wisenut was often mentioned in the media as a potential "Google killer," an underdog with novel technology that could potentially unseat the champ of web search.
When LookSmart purchased the search engine in April of this year, industry watchers scratched their heads, wondering how a search engine using crawler based technology fit with LookSmart's business model of using human editors to compile directories of the web.
LookSmart is preparing to answer those questions soon, with upcoming announcements of new partnerships and customers. We'll take an in-depth look the company's new strategy sometime in October.
Meanwhile, take a look at the re-engineered Wisenut search engine. Like Google and most of the other major search engines, Wisenut puts a lot of emphasis on link analysis, but also adds a few other ingredients to its secret sauce for calculating relevance.
"We spend more time judging quality of each link than some of the other engines do," said Peter Adams, LookSmart's Chief Technology Officer. "We spend a lot of time not just counting quantity but also looking at the quality based on the context of the connections."
In addition to link analysis, Wisenut also emphasizes the proximity of search terms in underlying documents, computing results in real time, based on your specific query.
Wisenut's index currently consists of just over 900 million documents, indexed within the past 60 days. LookSmart plans to both increase the size of the index and completely refresh it every 30 days, beginning next month.
Wisenut
http://www.wisenut.com
Wisenut, the Google Killer? Nah...
SearchDay #88, Sept. 5, 2001
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/01/sd0905-wisenut.html
The media is heralding Wisenut as the scrappy underdog that's supposedly going to topple Google from its "throne" as the king of web search. Not likely -- here's why.
LookSmart To Buy WiseNut
The Search Engine Report, April 2, 2002
http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/02/04-wisenut.html
LookSmart announced its intention to purchase the WiseNut search engine, which it hopes will turn LookSmart into an "all-in-one" solution for portals, internet service providers and others who need a search solution.
Search Headlines
NOTE: Article links often change. In case of a bad link, use the publication's search facility, which most have, and search for the headline.
JUNE SALE! Save 15%*
Save on all e-learning certification courses, including: SEO, Social Media, Online Marketing Foundation, Web Analytics and more. Enter CZAJU at checkout »
Offer expires June 30. *Discount not applicable on SES Online products.
