WiseNut Demo'ing Japanese Edition

[Brett_Tabke]

I see there is a new link on the home page to a demo signup in Japanese.

[wisenut.com...]

[bill]

Thanks for the heads up Brett. I sent them an e-mail to request access to the demo.

[bill]

Got an e-mail reply from WiseNut this morning telling me that I have to go fill out an online form to request access to the demo...

[Gorufu]

Hi Bill,

I sent an email to Wisenut and they replied within 12 hours and sent me an email with a login user and password and two attached Word Documents explaining how the ranking system works and technical specs.

[bill]

That's interesting Gorufu...here's the e-mail reply I got from WiseNut this AM

Dear WiseNut user,

Thank you for your interest in the WiseNut Japanese search engine demo! Unfortunately we are not able to grant you access to the demo engine at this time. Demo system availability is prioritized to investors, potential customers and partners. We have already received a large influx of requests from our users and we are very grateful for all your support. We will definitely place you on a special contact list for future reference and notifications. Keep in mind that the full production system should be available later this year.
Again, thank you so much for your interest!

Best Regards,
The WiseNut Team

I guess it'll be up to you to share any findings you might have...

[Gorufu]

Bill,

Have you checked your sticky mail?

[bill]

They didn't give a date, but according to an e-mail I received from Wisenut

we are currently in the process of launching the full production system through a major partner in Japan. We will definitely notify you of the official upcoming launch date. Thank you for all your patience!

So...there'll be a new Japanese engine to play with soon :)

[daikon]

And the new player is...Lycos. I was doing manual submissions yesterday and I noticed this:

[search.lycos.co.jp...]

For a machine translation of this page you might try pasting the text here: [excite.co.jp...] but be sure to click the lower radial button (Japanese --> English) before clicking the center button with the orange outline. The default is En --> Jp.

I am new to this forum, by the way. Please allow me a brief introduction. I have been doing SEO for 3 years. I currently work for a company in Tokyo that makes content management software. My job is to apply SEO ideas to the code that this software creates for our clients' sites. All of our clients are Japanese, and I am the only westerner in the office. If you'd like to know more, please email me.

Happy to be here.

[Woz]

Hi Daikon,

thanks for that and welcome to WebmasterWorld, hope you enjoy your stay.

You beat me to it by a smidge. I received an email from Wisenut about this just before you posted. I was told "WiseNut technology now powers search services at Lycos Japan [lycos.co.jp....] The service was launched in Japan on December 12th with a search database of 78 million Japanese pages."

There is a Press Release PDF file here [wisenut.com].

So, you got your wish Bill, a new player, well almost.

Onya
Woz

[andrea]

Hello all,

can we actually submit to Lycos Japan through WiseNut?

Could anyone post the link to the submission page?

Thanks

[heini]

sorry to break in here with a slightly off topic remark

So Lycos is having an affair with a younger lover? Already tired of Fast?

Do you Asia specialists happen to know anything about Lyos.asia being connected in any way to Wisenut?
When Fast started out, the Lycos Group was an early investor. So I'm wondering if anything similar might happen with Wisenut.

This deal should anyhow give Wisenut a considerable push on their way up.

[bill]

So one of the servers housing a big chunk of the Intranet I made and maintain decides to go belly up...I have to take a train out to Kyoto so that I can kick it a few times...and I miss all this fun stuff...;)

Welcome to WebmasterWorld daikon...interesting choice of names ;)

I got that same e-mail Woz. This really gives Lycos Japan a much needed boost. If the press release is accurate, this effectively doubles the amount of Japanese pages Lycos has indexed. The last time I checked their claim was that they had about 30 million pages indexed.

The Japanese press are dubbing WiseNut a potential "Google killer", which I find interesting. The Google/Yahoo alliance have taken such a huge slice of the market it will be nice to see some real competition for a change. I think WiseNut made a smart move going with Lycos Japan. Lycos Japan put a lot of money into infomercials here where they ran half-hour shows that in very basic terms showed the Japanese what a search engine was, and how to use their site. They already bought themselves a name here, so that half of the battle was already fought.

Lycos Japan's SERPs now look just like those on WiseNut. I think this will really set them apart. I showed a couple of people the Preview function, and they thought it had great potential. The old SERPs were nondescript, standard SE output. Now we get the page title, a Google-esque description of about 100 Japanese characters, or 200 English letters, and an indication of how many pages from each site are indexed. (and the Preview) This means you don't get the top 10 slots showing 10 pages from the same sites. I like it a lot so far.

can we actually submit to Lycos Japan through WiseNut?
Could anyone post the link to the submission page?

Actually, daikon posted the ADD URL link for Lycos Japan above. That page essentially says that they have temporarily stopped accepting URLs while introducing the WiseNut system. Your best bet would be to use the WiseNut site submission page [wisenut.com].

So Lycos is having an affair with a younger lover? Already tired of Fast?

Unless I missed it, Lycos Japan never used Fast results. I could have missed it because Lycos Japan has always been a 3rd tier engine as far as I was concerned. They weren't that relevant for the areas I was targeting, and never produced much traffic. This new WiseNut addition makes them a lot more attractive.

The biggest Fast partner in Japan now is the ISIZE [isize.com] portal.

One interesting aside here...the only English site mentioned on the Lycos Japan press release [lycos.co.jp] is Brett's [searchengineworld.com]

[Woz]

>daikon...interesting choice of names

Yes, rather cool don't you think!

Onya
Woz