What's up with Wisenut?

Wisenut crawling my sites heavily

[allanp73]

I noticed something really strange lately Wisenut (the SE which is similar to the Google of Old) has been visiting my sites steadily, more so tha any other search engine (3 times more). I looked at the search engine and my sites rank well and new pages appear quickly. Is Wisenut attempting to get big?
Has anyone else noticed this in their logs? How many people even use Wisenut?

[bhartzer]

I've also noticed that Wisenut/Looksmart is crawling heavily all of a sudden.

Maybe it's because of their plan to build niche directories/portals?

[allanp73]

"... because of their plan to build niche directories/portals?"

What do you mean?

[jeremy goodrich]

>>>How many people even use Wisenut?

Very, very few. It's hard (very hard) to find referral #1 from them in the logs I watch.

[allanp73]

Hi Jeremy,

That's what I have noticed. I know people use Looksmart and Wisenut powers their secondary results, but these results are always buried under dozens of ppc links. I was hoping to hear about their traffic stats.

Personally, I think Wisenuts results are great (not just for me, but in general). I would even say they are better than old Google (where new Google's results are so bad there is no comparison) and better than even Yahoo's. Yahoo has good results but lacks the freshness.

[jeremy goodrich]

Reminds me though of that discussion: if a tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound?

If the engine nobody uses provides the best results in the world, does it matter to webmasters? ;)

LS a number of times said "we're doing something with this engine, look out..." then, never followed up with anything to make people sit up & take notice - or garner enough press to give it critical mass.

[Dayo_UK]

Wisenut always seems to come up every month or two and I normally check results to see what the latest is....

Results dont look to bad..

Still seem to index my Iframes that have a noindex,nofollow on :(

The Crawler does seem to be out in force, the crawler is probably third behind Ask and Google in my logs. If only the visitors were third too....

[allanp73]

I imagine this is the way Google was several years ago. When people would say: Google who? or What's a Google?
Personally, I would like to see less domination by one or two search engines. Google before the Florida update accounted for 80-85% of my sites' traffic. Now Yahoo sits at 45%, MSN 20%, and Google 15% because the majority of terms I targeted were "city" related.

I would love to see a more level playing field where no one search engine dominates. I think 5-10 equally popular search engines would be best and at least 1-2 of them should put search quality before profits. I find paid listings a getting more and more prevalent and natural listings are getting more difficult to find.

I used to and still get bothered when I do a search for a niche term and I see a link for eBay or Amazon saying to try the search on their site.

[martinibuster]

Looksmart's interim CEO stated in an article published in Red Herring [redherring.com] that they were going to roll out Niche Directories.

I posted the news in the Supporters Forum a couple days ago.

Whether LS will backfill with WiseNut is anybody's guess. As Jeremy wisely notes, believe it when you see it.

[allanp73]

Not a bad article. Not nuch info about Looksmart and Wisenut. The directory roll out could result in a strong secondary market for them, but Looksmart is notorious for wasting opportunities.

[rfgdxm1]

My guess is that LS is aiming to become a serious player when it comes to Internet search. Clearly, after the MSN debacle, LS needs a different business model. Consider the possibility that LS is trying to become what MSN used to be when the were using LS. The trick to pulling this off will be turning Wisenut into a credible SE, such as Inktomi was with MSN. One necessary part of this is that they start crawling deep and often.

[allanp73]

I was thinking something similar. But LS and Wisenut would have to make up some serious ground on the competition. I think LS is probably pretty weak after loosing MSN.

[Stefan]

I get hammered by Wisenut. The thing crawls the site constantly, and has done this for many months, with never one referral from it that I can recall. I've often thought of banning it, but we do well in its serps, so in case it somehow, suddenly, becomes popular, I haven't.

[sidyadav]

Wisenut/LS is seeking attention.

Remember the time when the Wisenut bot had the "daily refresh" tag? and now, this. Its a total waste of time IMHO, they should focus on good things, rather than things that are made to seek attention. I suppose good things are things that are made to seek attention.

Sid

[Robert Charlton]

On some Wisenut searches I've checked recently, they're still listing pages that disappeared over two years ago, and they apparently haven't followed the 301s to their replacements.

[mathguy]

The last 6-7 months wisenut has been in the top 2-3 in the number of hits for bot traffic on my small hobby site. I can't remember the last time I got a referral from wisenut. Wisenut does farely poorly on their Alexa rankings. They have been in the 10-20K range for most of this year with the general trend going downward. Obviously we should all take the exact ranking with a grain of salt but that is far lower than virtually all search engines I know of. As I write this a search for wisenut on google news brings up all of 2 stories. The lack of press that wisenut or their parent company Looksmart have gotten recently doesn't bode well for a name that doesn't have much name recognition outside of technical circles.