BTLookSmart cracks open Wisenut

By Steve Malone

Posted on 6 Nov 2002 at 16:11

BTLooksmart is to incorporate the Wisenut search engine on its sites in the UK, starting with the BTOpenworld search facility. This follows a year's delay since Wisenut was bought by Looksmart Ltd.

Like Yahoo, BTLooksmart is a search directory that is built on human-edited entries and is financed by paid-for listings. Adding Wisenut's estimated 900 million pages will, so BTLooksmart claims, add a powerful search engine to underpin the human categorisation.

Wisenut claims to have several advantages over Google in ordering its page rankings. Mat Ellis, BTLooksmart's CTO said 'unlike Google we will check a link at both ends For example, when we see a link "Al Gore" we check the page at the other end so that it doesn't refer to a page about the US Vice President as Google did.'

Wisenut also claims to have a different way of adding weight to a site's links. In the Google scheme of things, a page's 'ranking' is governed by the 'ranking' of all the pages that link to it. According to Ellis, a page's ranking is governed by the size of the linking site. Thus, a link from the BBC site which has tens of thousands of pages and will have been encountered thousands of times by wisebot, will have greater weight than a link from a personal Website that may only have a few pages. Although the technology was developed to improve the relevancy, says Ellis, it also has the effect of preventing pages being artificially inflated by Blogs.

Over the next couple of weeks, BTLooksmart intends to roll out the WiseGuide tool on its site. When a word is typed in by a user, WiseGuide will not only search for the exact match but also word groupings and provide a list of subcategories which can be added to the keywords for a subsequent search. Hence, searching for 'Palm' will provide the user with word groupings for 'PDAs', 'parts of hands' and 'tropical trees'. By adding PDAs to the subsequent 'Palm' search, you end up at the right place.

The final technology offered by Wisenut is the most visible. The 'sneak-a-peek' function opens a preview window for you to see particular search results, letting you quickly view the destination search page. This could eliminate a lot of the 'click a link then click back' behaviour usually seen on search engines.

BTLookSmart is not announcing when it is to offer Wisenut out to its partners - MSN, Tiscali, NTLHome, Alta Vista and UK Plus, but says that it wants to make sure its partners and users are happy with the BTOpenworld service first.