Will Wisenut EVER update?

[rfgdxm1]

Agent: Mozilla/4.0 compatible ZyBorg/1.0 ([e-mail]; [WISEnutbot.com)...]

From my logs. Even though Wisenut is showing year old SERPs, they still are spidering. The question is now that Looksmart bought them will they resurrect Wisenut from the dead.

[jeremy goodrich]

Somebody posted a while back about how it seemed that WiseNut built their db from perhaps crawling other sites search results, and then filtering and ranking those.

Try searching for 'excite search results for' and then you'll see what I mean.

Apart from that, generally speaking, their relevancy (though they need to do a db refresh) is pretty good.

If they ever sped up the speed of their search, I'm sure that would improve it a lot.

However, since LookSmart bought them, I'm not holding out much hope. Seen the new sponsored links at the top of the page when you search? It seems like they are doing a poor imitation of the Google look and feel with their premium listings...

[rfgdxm1]

VERY interesting there about some of those search results. They very well may have started out building their database that way. However, Wisenut has in fact had a bot of their own for a long time. Even though the database they are using is a year old now or greater, they most definitely have been spidering since then, and still are to this day. They just have never used any of it for updates. Perhaps they have been trying to get Wisenut to really work, but never worked the bugs out?

As for hope since Looksmart bought them out, I dunno about how much hope there is. Why would Looksmart bother unless they intended to take Wisenut farther? Those sponsored links at the top seem to suggest that is what they want to do. Of course, they won't sell many unless they manage to update the database and keep it fresh. Basically, my sense is that Wisenut is a beta of a search engine that is still under development. If Looksmart wants to compete with Google, they would realize they need to do better.