WiseNut

» see wisenut.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

By the autumn of 2001 the question of which search engine to use had already closed for me, and I do not remember making the decision. Google was the box, at home on the TTNet line and later on whatever machine I sat at in a cafe. Something that arrived that September needed to be better by a margin large enough to break a habit I had not noticed forming. WiseNut was better in a way. it was not better in that way.

Yeogirl Yun started it in 1999, after co-founding mySimon, which was one of the first comparison shopping sites and had sold well enough to make a second attempt affordable. The engine went public on 5 September 2001, six days before a week when nobody in the world was thinking about search engines, which is bad luck of a kind you cannot price into a launch plan.

The technology was real. WiseNut ran its own crawler, not a rented index, which by 2001 already put it in a very short line of companies. The visible part was WiseGuide: it read the result set for your query and split it into labeled topic groups, so a search for a common word came back as a set of folders rather than as ten blue links and a next button. Teoma was doing something close at the same moment, which tells you the idea was in the water.

LookSmart announced it was buying the company on 12 March 2002, for around 9.25 million dollars in stock, and closed the deal that April. That is a fast sale for an engine six months old, and the price says what the market thought of a good crawler with no audience. WiseNut ran on inside LookSmart as machinery for a few more years. it went dark in the last days of September 2007.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the pitch ~

Every search engine of that era pitched relevance, and relevance is impossible to demonstrate in an advertisement, so the ones with money bought television and the ones without money bought a gimmick. Clustering was the good version of a gimmick, because it was also a genuine answer to a genuine problem: a one-word query has several meanings, and a flat list makes you scroll through all of them to find yours.

The trouble is that the problem was solved on the other side. Google taught people to write longer queries instead of sorting shorter ones, and a habit is cheaper to teach than an interface is to change. once you are typing three words instead of one, the folders have nothing left to do.

~ why nobody switched ~

Nobody switched because nobody was unhappy. That is the whole thing, and it is not a comment on WiseNut's engineering, which by every account was decent. A search engine is not chosen the way a piece of software is chosen. it is a reflex, in a box on a page you already have open, and it gets replaced only when it fails you visibly and often.

Google was not failing anybody in 2001. the exact market share that year, but the direction was already settled, and the remaining engines were competing for the part of the market that had not formed a reflex yet, which shrank every month. AlltheWeb had a bigger index and lost anyway. Teoma had better link analysis and got folded into Ask.

~ the actual end ~

There was no shutdown notice, because by 2007 there was nothing left to notice. LookSmart had spent the decade shrinking, having lost its own defining deal when Microsoft stopped paying for its directory listings in 2003, and WiseNut was a line item inside a company with worse problems. The site simply stopped answering in the last week of September and the domain went quiet.

What stays interesting is the shape of the failure. WiseNut did not lose on index size, and it did not lose on results. still, it lost on arrival time, which is the one variable a startup cannot work on. every search engine after 2000 was selling a replacement for something that was not broken, and none of them found a way to say that out loud.

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