WiseNut results

Have they deteriorated?

[Robert Charlton]

When WiseNut was first launched, I thought their results were pretty good because some of my sites were doing well. ;) The results were roughly consistent with Fast, Google, Inktomi, etc....

Because they haven't been a big source of traffic, I haven't watched them much since... I noticed there was a bunch of spam a while back that they cleared up, but haven't checked them often. I assumed I was probably continuing to do OK.

Just took a look, and the results are not what I'd call great. Sites that are in the top 10 everywhere else are back on the 3rd and 4th page on WiseNut, if I can find them at all. Competing results look pretty anomalous. Sometimes, I'll see a site ranking on a three word phrase when only two of the words are present... like search for big red widgets and you turn up a big red kumquat.

Anyone else see this and have any thought what might be going on? I'd been seeing WiseNut as a player for the future, so I've wanted to stay near the top.

[Liane]

Yep ... I wrote in a post sometime last week that I couldn't recognize the first page results as being even remotely similar to any of the other free engines.

I don't know how their algo works ... but its not like any of the others. Looking at some of the results, I see very few index pages in the top results and if you use a keyword analyser, top results seem to have a *very low tolerance* for keyword density.

I think they need to work on their algo quite a bit! Otherwise, it could be a great engine for second and third tier pages ... but I wouldn't go optimizing for it just yet!