Review of Debuting in beta form in July 2001 and launching out of beta in Sept. 2001, this new search engine has built its own large database. Like Teoma, it features some automatically-generated, semantically-related searches, known as WiseGuide categories. It lacks full Boolean and most advanced search features. Use the table of contents on the left to navigate this review.
Databases:
WiseNut has one single database of indexed Web pages.
No additional databases or portal features are available at this time. WiseNut does have one partner site, Korea WiseNut.
Strengths:
* New database
* Customization features
Weaknesses:
* Numerous duplicates as of Aug. 2001
* No cached pages
* Lacks almost all advanced search capabilities.
Default Operation:
The default setting is an AND operation.
Boolean Searching:
No Boolean searching is available, although WiseNut defaults to an AND between search terms and supports the use of - for NOT. The AND and NOT functions are also available on WISEsearch, the advanced search form. It uses 'WITH ALL of the words' and 'WITHOUT ANY of these words' as the form labels.
Proximity Searching:
Phrase searching is available by using "double quotes" around a phrase or entering terms into the "Phrase Match" box on WISEsearch, the advanced search form.
Truncation:
No truncation is currently available.
Case Sensitivity:
Searches are not case sensitive. Search terms entered in lowercase, uppercase, or mixed case all get the same number of hits.
Field Searching:
No field searching is available.
Limits:
WiseNut offers the ability to limit to one or more of 25 languages. This is only available under "set search preferences." The available languages follow. No other limits are available at this time.
- Chinese
- Czech
- Danish
- Dutch
- English
- Estonian
- Finnish
- French
- German
- Greek
- Hebrew
- Hungarian
- Icelandic
- Italian
- Japanese
- Korean
- Latvian
- Lithuanian
- Norwegian
- Polish
- Portuguese
- Romanian
- Russian
- Spanish
- Swedish
Stop Words:
WiseNut does ignore frequently-occurring words such as 'the,' 'of', 'and', and 'or'.
However, like at Google and Teoma, these stop words can be searched by putting a + in front of them. Unlike at Google, putting a + in front of non-stop words will not cause all + signs will be ignored.
Sorting:
By defaults, sites are sorted in order of perceived relevance. There is no option for sorting alphabetically, by site, or by date.
Display:
WiseNut displays the title, 1-2 line extract, number of and link to other matches from the same site, the URL, and [Sneak-a-Peek]. The latter will open a view of the match right below the result in a scrollable window, but this only works in IE and not in Netscape versions 4. WiseNut clusters results by site, but aids the searcher by giving the number of other matches from the same site. Above the search results, WiseNut displays the query, total number of results, the WiseGuide categories, and then the first 10 results.
WiseNut does offer a personalization capability (under "set search preferences"). This allows users to control the following:
- See 10, 20, 40, 50, or 100 hits at a time
- Include the summary (keywords in context) or not
- Turn site clustering on or off
- Limit searches to any of 25 languages
- Choose encoding scheme
- Turn WiseGuide categories on or off
- Enable WiseWatch, an adult content filter