Just an FYI to the very few people who may care - WiseNut search engine has been closed down by it's current owner LookSmart. While it may not have been a big player in the search world it was very unique and it did have a lot of early potential. With every unique or established search engine that closes it gives me the feeling that we are getting one step closer to a Google dominated world (if we are not already there). I like Google, but I also like options and competition just to keep everyone honest...
Oh Crikeys! For a moment there I thought WiseNut was another forum member. Phew! Thank God it was only another search engine. RIP. Looks like it was bought out by LookSmart. Crazy to leave it like that. That site is PR7. I could use a domain like that for my IM work.
Wisenut faded way after being purchased. Same thing that happened to alltheweb, teoma, infoseek etc Wisenut was officially launched in September 2001 Looksmart bought the search engine in April 2002 for $9 million with the aim of introducing a major search engine.
Crikeys! again! They shelved the domain after buying it for $9million? Gee they can send me some money if they're still throwing it around like that.
Yeah, I would love to have that domain and it seems like such a waste of money to not even try to sell the engine to someone to recoup something. Hell I would love to have it at the right price!
they will probs re-activate it.. .. after they have gained a lot of traffic and users via the wisenut backlink
not if i get my way lo as it be great for my new project so i going to try to find out how much they are asking for it
I liked WiseNut, I thought it brought something new to the table. But then again, I liked Northern Light as well. Goog is definitely the lead dog for the next 10 rounds.
Just out of curiosity did he mention the budget range he was looking to get for it? I would be very interested to see if they try to get.
Looksmart is a business driven company, keeping Wisenut was becoming an obstacle more than it was worth. When you consider staffing it, marketing, bandwidth usage - it just did not land the ROI that they needed to make it viable. The domain name wont be sold for anytime soon. Afterall, anyone with some good cashflow could convert it to a multi-b cash cow.
It was a very promising search engine awhile back, but never seemed to keep up the momentum and marketing.
Yahoo did the same thing (as part of the Overture purchase) with All The Web and Alta Vista In 2003, Overture acquired AltaVista in a $140 million cash and stock deal and purchased FAST's web search (All The Web) for $70 million in cash
Not quite the same thing as Yahoo! did integrate the technologies of those search engines when building the foundation for the current Yahoo! search engine.
I believe they used inkomi and overture for the technologies. All The Web and Alta Vista were a waste of money but there was nothing that yahoo could do as they were overture acquisitions.