Wisenut is part of the Looksmart stable. I seems to be going for the Google-like 'stripped down' look, taken to puritan extremes. Each search provides a 'Wiseguide' at the top, which has additional suggested terms. While doing the test, we were continually being given 'temporary server overload' messages, which suggests this service is not getting the hardware provision it needs. Hmmm.

1. Commercial product - digital cameras

A good selection of reviews and camera sales sites; unfortunately also featured results from news site Cnet which were two months old. Why do so many search engines believe we want old news stories about our search term?

2. Commercial product actual model - a product brand + model name

We used Sony Cybershot. Though the reults were accurate and relevant, the freshness was appalling - the eighth result was for cameras three years old, and the ninth (review page) was eighteen months old.

3. Commercial purchase - buy CDs

The search produced a really strange set of relevant but bizarre and second-rate pages. Again there were many news pages featured (like the Miami Herald) which is simply hopeless for a search like this. The lack of PPC or sponsored links becomes critical here.

4. Entertainment - Naomi Campbell

Relevant results, but agin too many old news items. We begin to see why grade 1 engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN separate out their news searching completely.

5. Entertainment - games cheats

This was a really disappointing search - the results were repetitive, and most of the snippets were just meaningless strings of words, plus the odd 'Continue to disable this ad'. Once again, irrelevant news items.

6. Precise requirement - Berkeley sociology

The required page was at in the top position, but number two had as its descriptive snippet "Home > Berkeley Sociology Categories Beach Babes Beach Ball Beach Bandits Beach Bar Beach Bar Hampton Bays Beach Bash Hermosa Beach Bedding Beach Bend Beach Bike Beach Bikini Beach Bikinis Beach ... " and the link goes to a dead page. This indicates both a poor ranking algorithm and very old spidered results.

7. Precise requirement - Dublin Ireland hotel

This produced a reasonable set of results, but again with irrelevant news items scattered among them.

8. Precise / Travel - New York London airfare

Poor, old and irrelevant results, and only 18(!) of them.

9. Research - asthma information

Slightly better results here, but we had to use a phrase search to get decent listings.

10. Research - Iraq maps

Result number three: "CBC - Microsoft maps its next step in battle with Google...." Result number five: "Foxnews - Eco groups use online Paps in mine fight..." If users don't know about phrase searching, they may as well not bother.

11. Searching - Dogpile.com

The main Dogpile site was number one in the listings, and the .uk site was number two - this search worked.

12. Searching - Ask Jeeves

The results for this search were good.

Summary:

Using Wisenut is a disappointing experience, and the lack of any sponsored listings as yet is a severe handicap to the usefulness of the results for commercial or product searches. The server failures, the consistent inclusion of items from news sources for searches of any kind, the ranking inconsistencies and the obvious fact that the results are not at all fresh lead to the conclusion this almost unknown search engine will remain in obscurity.

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Wisenut search engine - analysis and comments at dunbeacon.net