Type of site Web search engine | Current status defunct | |
Launched July 2001; 15 years ago (2001-07) | ||
WiseNut was a crawler-based search engine owned by Looksmart. It debuted as a beta in July 2001 and was officially launched in September 2001. Like Teoma, WiseNut automatically clustered search results, a technology called WiseGuide. Despite a good start, WiseNut never managed to become a major search engine. It lacked boolean search in the standard search and other advanced search features. Unlike other search engines, WiseNut did not Cache (computing)cache pages.
Looksmart bought the search engine in April 2002, for $9 million, with the aim of positioning it as a major search engine. The revamp was not successful. Despite having a large database of over 1.5 billion URIs, WiseNut remained a small player.
Wisenut closed for good on September 28, 2007.