WISENutbot (Looksmart)

Will it ever list me in the SERP's

[Alternative Future]

Hi all,

I have been getting hit like mad from the WISENutbot (Between June & July - getting about 80% of my pages), and I have never paid to be listed in the Looksmart directory.
My question is: is it worth allowing it to trawl my site and shall I ever get a listing in either wisenut or looksmart?
Also when does it update the dB in either of the above SE's, I have read through some older posts dated last year with nothing really set fast and sure about its update cycle/process to help me answer this question, I was hoping that some of you guyz might be able to assist me :)

Thanks in advance.

KR,

-gs

[pixel_juice]

Wisenutbot I think only affects pages in wisenut.com. Looksmart is a whole other ball game since it is entirely directory/PPC based (and so does no crawling).

Wisenut's bot has regularly and consistently hit many of my pages since the search engine first launched, and even more often recently. However, despite all this use of my bandwidth, it still displays pages from many months ago that haven't existed for some considerable time.

Although wisenut seemes quite promising early on, it never updates and its results are therefore poor. They seem to have a crawl schedule, but no indexing schedule.

If you ask me Wisenut is a complete waste of time. You won't get any traffic from it. If it continues to take pages from my sites but not index them (it's second only to Google and Inktomi on some sites in terms of bandwidth and frequency of visits) I will just ban their bot and that will be that.

[Alternative Future]

Thanks pixel_juice,

Glad someone else has the same frame of mind as I do...

Don't see why I should allow that amount of bandwidth to be used on a worthless cause either :)
And now knowing that looksmart don't use it I see no point in letting it in for no traffic from wisenut.

Thx again.

-gs

[pixel_juice]

To be honest i'm very reluctant to ban wisenut because it should be a useful service - the algo is decent and the site itself is OK. But it annoys me that they do so much crawling and then don't bother to index the pages. It makes no sense to me at all.

Naturally, I will be keeping an eye on what they're up to on the off chance that they ever decide to become a real search engine ;)

[rfgdxm1]

My impression of Wisenut is that it is a search engine that really has never got out of beta yet. Presumably with Looksmart buying it they plan on changing that.

[jeremy goodrich]

They went out of beta in Sept 2001 ;) months before LookSmart bought them - despite a mainstream article's reference to them as "beta" to the contrary.

This is an engine that is fully working and out of "beta" and has been for a while. Though now, when you read the "about page" on WiseNut, you see it says,

WiseNut is a LookSmart search engine

I take that to mean, they don't intend to index the web anymore (as previously they did when they debuted with a number of pages indexed very similar to the Google number of the day - 1.6 billion).

<added> LookSmart bought WiseNut in the 1st or 2nd quarter, 2002 - so they have had well over a year to integrate, upgrade, etc the technology that powers the thing to do whatever they planned on doing. In similar time frame since Gigablast has been released, they (with far fewer resources) have accomplished a lot more so I highly doubt LookSmart has any "significant" plans for this one.
</added>

[jdMorgan]

Interestingly, Wisenut updated at least some part of their index sometime between yesterday and today. A site I made big changes on several months ago took a dramatic jump up in their SERPs to #2 as of today, with the new title and description showing. It looks like the crawl data was from at least two months ago, though. So, slowly, but surely...

Jim

[jrobbio]

Yes I can confirm what jdMorgan has said. There's still some bugs in it though, I clicked on "see more pages from this site!" and it came up with page from another site so go figure.

I did a search for Google news and the date that appeared was the 5th of March. I'm not really seeing any dates later than that.

I highly doubt LookSmart has any "significant" plans for this one.

The infamous grub dataset will most likely appear sometime this Autumn on Wisenut, whether it is as a testbed or not I'm not sure.

Rob

[edited by: jrobbio at 11:54 am (utc) on July 18, 2003]

[Dayo_UK]

*Falls of chair*

Wisenut actually has updated!

But not very well for my site - Funny thing being Wisenut has managed to index iframes that are in the pages rather than than the page the iframe is in. I have got a noindex, nofollow on the iframe contents too but cant remember when I added that or when wisenut crawled.

Wonder why it has not indexed the page that contains the iframe though. - Anyone else seeing problems with frames or iframes?

Anyway at least there is sign of life.

I take that to mean, they don't intend to index the web anymore (as previously they did when they debuted with a number of pages indexed very similar to the Google number of the day - 1.6 billion).

I am not in Looksmart/Zeal and do get crawled by Zyborg - so I assume that Wisenut do still plan to index the web.

Having said all this - it is hard to get excited about Wisenut :(

[Fischerlaender]

Encouraged by the news about Wisenut I did some queries there. I have to say I'm really disappointed! Wisenut even didn't find the "official" homepage in the top ten results when searching for some big city or company. Any other (semi-)major search engine has better results than Wisenut.

[jeremy goodrich]

Imho, Gigablast is *way* ahead of where WiseNut is. Every time I go back to Gigablast, I am surprised at the quality of the results.

WiseNut, for how long they've been in development & owned by a publically held company, has always been a colossal dissappointment. Even if they *do* integrate the grub distributed results, that won't fix their ranking algo, as distributed crawling only helps an engine have a bigger database.

Ranking it well, is still yet to be solved by their team, imho, though I'm sure they are working on it. Time will tell if they ever fix it.

[Robert Charlton]

I think this juxtaposition is hilarious...

WISENutbot (Looksmart)
Will it ever list me in the SERP's
Alternative_Future

It may indeed take an alternative future before WiseNut updates for real.