wisenut

[futureX]

Hey, i've not seen much of wisenut until recently, but I noticed that my site is actually listed there, what listings does wisenut access? As I noticed that it crawled php sessions which no other search engine has. Also i was wondering how to remove a URL, as the one that is up is out of date and on the wrong server.

[jeremy goodrich]

Their DB is wildly out of date, WiseNut was purchased by LookSmart some time back.

They have their own db which they cull from the web, and they say that they start with Zeal as a root database, and from what I've seen, they crawl DMOZ heavily as well.

Bottom line - since corp's can get thousands of listings cheap in the Zeal db as part of a 'package' any search there has got to be grossly in favor of that.

Relevance, freshness, and bandwidth are all seriously lacking there. To top it off, they return results very slow.

Perhaps someday, it'll get better. For example, LookSmart recently purchased Grub.org, which is a distributed crawler. So perhaps they will (if they get enough volunteers) increase their relevance, freshness, and over all quality.

Though I won't be holding my breath...

[robjones]

Just checking my own site now and it seems like wisenut is after updating itself.

[Ankheg]

Still painfully, painfully outdated. Until they manage to get better than five-month-old results, they're going to continue to be a joke.

My sites' listings in their DB are circa December 2002, including several pages that haven't existed since early January.

[robjones]

Still, it's a vast improvement on their old results. Maybe they'll start updating more frequently.

[indigojo]

Yep definate update, although still a lot of stale content

[jrobbio]

Referring to a comment by the grub team, Wisenut is being updated as of a week back with what the grub crawlers have found. I get the feeling though that there is a massive backlog so it may be sometime until one could consider it fresh.

[Jillibert]

I think from memory Looksmart did one crawl with Zyborg for Wisenut after acquiring it and that was in September.

Since then there has been some developments i am sure everyone is aware of but in regards to Wisenut i think the most important has been the buyout of Grub by Looksmart in January.

I think Wisenut was essentially put on hold crawling until this new purchase in Grub began crawling,
As Jrobbio points out it is the intention of Looksmart to use the Grub results in Wisenut and it may be a little while until Wisenut is as relevant as we would like.

I am not convinced Looksmart is going to use Wisenut in any commercial form either other then to be used i think to backfill Looksmart and help with relevancy issues for Looksmart search results delivered to its partners.

Might be some major developments on that front this week.

[jlr1001]

Until they manage to get better than five-month-old results, they're going to continue to be a joke.

Now that LookSmart owns the Grub crawler and, according to the Grub's website ([grub.org ]), Wise Nut's db will be created from Grub's "real-time" crawl, WN's out of date index issues should quickly become a thing of the past.

-jlr1001

[jdMorgan]

> out of date index issues should quickly become a thing of the past.

I hope so, but considering that many, many grub crawlers have ignored robots.txt for so long, they are going to need to change the User-agent string in order to get to the whole web...

90% of all grubs I see do not fetch robots.txt - even if it's got a one-second expiry on it. I'm not sure if this is a grub flaw, or if there are a lot of grub user-agent spoofers out there.

Search engine crawlers need to properly identify themselves these days, and I wonder how they're going to get past that problem.

Jim

[charge]

Adwords overture findwhat they all work the top part of the page.Looksmarts results work the rest.This is where relevency is of more importance.Thats their commercial aim but the positive spin off is non commercial search.Judging by some posts maybe they have bitten more than they can chew.Nothing wrong with having a go though.
cheers.
charge!