What is WiseNut?
WiseNut is a no-frills general search engine owned
by
LookSmart.
WiseNut offers a good, solid general search experience; they don't have a lot in the way of
fancy-shmancy search stuff, but what they do have seems to be relatively well-done.
How To use WiseNut
Searching in
WiseNut is simple, just type in your query
to the main search bar and away you go. My query for
snow
brought back search results with text links and annotations, as well as clustered results at the
top of the search results page - or WiseGuide categories.
What is WiseGuide?
WiseGuide are basically
search suggestions that are related to what you're searching for - it's a great
way to narrow down or broaden your search. For instance, in my search for "snow", an extremely
general search term, my WiseGuide search suggestions were much more helpful:
WiseNut WiseSearch
WiseNut also offers a neat little advanced search widget that they call
WiseSearch;
basically, they're helping you "search like an expert."Simply type in the keywords in the boxes
offered, set a couple of basic parameters, and you might get lucky. This is just basic search
syntax; you can read more about it in
Basic Search - Add and Subtract
or
Basic Boolean.
WiseNut Preferences
Last but not least I should mention that you can set some pretty sophisticated search preferences in
WiseNut Search Preferences. You can
select which language you'd like to search in, what browser language, whether you want WiseGuide
results to show up, results clustering, and more. Most search engines don't offer the level of
customization that WiseNut offers in setting preferences; this was a nice surprise.
Why Should I Use WiseNut?
While WiseNut won't win any prizes for bells and whistles in the search department, I found it to
be fast and relevant. The search results clustering - WiseGuide - is a big favorite of mine since
I find it always helps me make my searches better. Lastly, WiseNut's search preferences are
extremely personalized, making WiseNut a good choice for your general search engine needs.
