Traffic Flow SEO

I recently visited one of my favorite search engines WiseNut, a great secondary source of relevant search results and was a little saddened to realize that it had recently been shut down. In a day and age where it seems like Google may end up controlling the world it was nice to have another option in the search engine realm.

Back in 2001 when it was launched it used its own database and had critical acclaim as becoming a real player in the search engine world (the same was true for Teoma which was later bought and integrated into Ask.com). It never really lived up to its potential due to lack of features and updates, but did have around 1.5 billion pages indexed which allowed it to return some interesting and relevant search results.

LookSmart bought WiseNut in April of 2002 for a whopping $9 million dollars which, as of the recent WiseNut closing ended up being a bust for them. LookSmart has basically shut down or sold almost every Web-based business unit they owned in the last couple of years from their very established online directory, Zeal to their online parental controls technology, NetNanny to their open source distributed search crawler platform (search engine), Grub and now WiseNut. The only thing left is Furl which may go soon.

It is a sad day to loose another established player (even if it was only a minor player) in the search engine competition.