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The Internet

HotBot Returns 219

Posted by Hemos from the back-from-the-dead dept.
iosphere writes "Terra Lycos put out a 'new and improved' HotBot today. The interface has been redone with search results courtesy of either FAST, Google, Inktomi, or Teoma." HotBot was one of my favorite search engines, back in the day.
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HotBot Returns More

HotBot Returns

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  • Worst. Engine. Ever. (Score:1, Informative)

    by Zigg ( 64962 )

    I could never get decent results from HotBot. I'd try it every now and again when my then-favorite (AltaVista) was giving me grief, but it always returned hits that were essentially worthless.

  • I remember back in the day when I used to go to hotbot for all my search needs. That was waaay before google. It rocked back then.

  • HotBot (Score:1, Interesting)

    by molywi ( 136881 )
    HotBot was a great search engine just as altavista started going downhill. The thing that bothered me about hotbot was the neon green color scheme they used. Looks like that has been fixed! HOORAY!

  • Oops! (Score:5, Funny)

    by GeckoFood ( 585211 ) <geckofood@nosPAM.gmail.com> on Monday December 16, 2002 @02:28PM (#4899954) Journal

    Guess what happens when you type HotBox.com instead of HotBot.com? Not cool when you're at work.... :-(

    Hopefully this new and improved HotBot will be comparable to Google in speed. Old one was slow, I thought.

    • It looks like HotBot is powered by ASP & IIS. Don't get too hopeful for great performance.

      What is HotBox powered by, by the way?
    • Our school insisted we use hotbot or altavista. Hotbot was impossible to access over the school's lousy connection.

    • Re:Oops! (Score:3, Funny)

      by T-Kir ( 597145 )

      Sounds similar... I remember back in my first year of my Soft Eng degree, some of my friends were in a lab session punching in random band names... although one hit a problem when he tried www.queen.com while the lecturer was walking over to have a look. Let's just say it had nothing to do with Freddie Mercury and Co!

      Now to go ontopic for all those mods! I remember the only thing useful about HotBot was the warez related searches, since I always used Yahoo! (but it's results were "cleaner" so to speak)... that is until AstaLaVista and Google came along.

      • I have a similar story. The mother of a friend of mine is into buying toys and clothes and stuff for her grandkids. Way back in the early days of the popular Web, like 1995 or thereabouts, she went online looking for a brand of kid's stuff called "Lil' Tykes."

        I categorically refuse to tell you what came up when she typed "lil tykes" into a search engine. As far as I know, the poor woman hasn't used the Internet since.

  • Why not all 4 at once? (Score:5, Informative)

    by tbmaddux ( 145207 ) on Monday December 16, 2002 @02:31PM (#4899988) Homepage Journal
    I saw this on Google News and went to check it out, but got annoyed quickly when I couldn't search all four engines at once with collated results. It can't be that hard to do.

    Plus they dumped at least 10 cookies on me. Google only uses one. I'll keep Googling...

    • Are the four cookies taking up too much space on the ol' 2 MB hard drive or something?
      • Are the four cookies taking up too much space...
        I said at least 10. I wasn't kidding (stopped counting at 10 and there were >1 left). It just slows me down in the Mozilla cookie manager, which I check somewhat frequently. Given that Google can apparently store a lot of preference data in just one lousy cookie (see, it's not a space issue, its a convenience issue), there's no good reason for Hotbot to clutter my life with 10... so they won't, I ain't goin' there.
    • I saw this on Google News and went to check it out, but got annoyed quickly when I couldn't search all four engines at once with collated results. It can't be that hard to do.

      That would be MetaCrawler [metacrawler.com]. It checks many different search engines are returns the results from all of them combined.

  • too slow? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by shokk ( 187512 ) <ernieoporto.yahoo@com> on Monday December 16, 2002 @02:31PM (#4899989) Homepage Journal
    Most including the old Hotbot were too slow. This seems to be much zippier under the Inktomi engine, but we'll have to see how it compares to Google. Cool thing is that it will use the last search engine you clicked so if you like the Google engine better than the Inktomi engine, then that's what it will use.

    • Re:too slow? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by LostCluster ( 625375 ) on Monday December 16, 2002 @02:35PM (#4900040)
      But why would you visit HotBot.com to use Google when it's still directly there at Google.com?

      This site seems to be a "keep-alive" of the hotbot.com domain name, rather than a serious attempt at creating a useful site. Lycos is just hoping to get a little money out of the fact that people still have bookmarks to hotbot.com from back in the day.

  • So? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Swaffs ( 470184 ) <swaff AT fudo DOT org> on Monday December 16, 2002 @02:31PM (#4899990) Homepage
    I thought it was generally accepted that Google is far-and-away the best search engine. Do others have their advantages in certain areas or something? I wouldn't know, as I only use Google, but why should we care that hotbot's back?

    • Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by stripmarkup ( 629598 ) on Monday December 16, 2002 @02:42PM (#4900119) Homepage
      If you are searching for something that is pretty rare, such as a friend of yours, there may not be more than a few relevant pages in the entire web. No search engine covers all the web. It is possible that Google may find one or two results and another search engine such as Fast or Inktomi may find one or two different results. It happens to me pretty often.

    • Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by LostCluster ( 625375 ) on Monday December 16, 2002 @02:47PM (#4900178)
      Google's selling point is it's "PageRank Technology" which is a formula primarily based on the theory that the best sites are the sites that are linked to by other high-rated sites. This has been a great advancement over the serarches that ranked only by the number of times the search words appeared on the page, which frequenly returned garbage results.

      The problem is that as we get more dependant on Google, we are ignoring the sites that Google chooses to low-rank. This promotes a "rich get richer" attiude, as the top rated sites for any given keywords on Google get a lot of free traffic as a result.

      To put it another way, since TechTV.com is linked to by many people, links on that site carry more weight in Google than a link in the average person's blog. Therefore, the selection of Site of the Nite and Download of the Day from the crew on "The Screen Savers" and resulting link boosts the PageRank value of the site being linked to. However, since Megan Morrone and Martin Sarget use Google to find the sites and programs they'll recommend, a loop is created.

      Slashdot suffers from the same problem. A linked-to story on Slashdot gets a Pagerank boost, how many /.'ers find the stories they submit, or the sites with which to look for stories to submit, via Google?

      Google's sources for what to consider the top links are influenced by what are presently the top links.
      • This promotes a "rich get richer" attiude, as the top rated sites for any given keywords on Google get a lot of free traffic as a result.

        While this intuitively would seem to be the case, data from the field shows that this is not happening. Good new pages pretty quikly rise up to their level of popularity even though they start "poor".

        This was in a recent paper by Barabasi (I think) in which he analyzed the behaviour of the late time arrival under the power-law distribution, which is accepted as the best current model for linking. Surprisingly, bad "old money" still lost to quality "noveau rich".

        As an aside this shows the value of science testing even the most obvious assertions at least once as every so often what you just know to be the case is not actually so.

        • Is this your study? [nec.com]

          It doesn't support your point. In fact the abstract says "The rate of acquisition of new links is probably proportional to the number of links the site already has, because the more links a site has, the more visible it becomes and the more new links it will get." Yes, new sites have the ability to quickly get a lot of links, but without the benefit of being mentioned by the existing media, it's hard to get the visibility which is required to get the links.
        • Two comments from my steve-parker.org domain: 1) Tends to be in the top 3 of any search engine for "bourne shell programming tutorial" or similar searches. 2) My employer (netops.co.uk), who host steve-parker.org as a "fringe benefit" typed into Google what we do (Sun solaris stuff, not sure of his exact search string) and my CV came up as the top result. (1) above gives me a warm glow. (2) above gave me an uncomfortable explanation about how search engines work. About (1) : Even though I get in the top 3 on most search engines, my Page Rank seems to be middling. However, I plugged sysview.net from steve-parker.org, and sysview.net rose up Google's rankings. About (2) : Okay, the search was looking for those skills, both my CV and netops.co.uk matched, but mine had a higher PageRank (due to having actual content, not just "this is netops!"), but in two different contexts, I'd want one or the other. Google doesn't understand the concept of context. There is tons of room for improvement - my personal hope is that someone usurps Google, then someone usurps them, etc, etc - otherwise we've another Netscape/IE issue but far more serious - not just the UI, but the data people can find on the net. Control that, and you have a *lot* of power.
    • Back in the day, Hotbot offered one-stop searching of affiliated sites like eLibrary that weren't indexed by the spider engines, similar (but moch broader than) Google's catalog search.

      Nowadays, it appears (from personal experience a moment ago) to be a good place to go to be told "You need to download a standards-compliant browser to skin our site (with links to IE and Netscape) while browsing with Mozilla 1.2.1.
    • Hotbot used to be both faster (if you used the text-only interface, as I always did), and much better at digging up *obscure* results than any of the other search engines.

      But over the past few years, and concurrent with the increased drive to turn it into a portal, the quality of results gradually declined to where most of what you got back was either irrelevant or porn. As it happened, this was during the same timeframe when Google got really *good*. Which is why I gradually stopped using hotbot, even tho it had been my search engine of choice for several years.

      Now.. At least with a CSS-disabled browser, the hotbot site is now back to looking like a useful search engine instead of a glorified advertising feeder. We'll see how it does as a search engine.. [does quick search that with Google, produces approx. 200 results] 46 results, including a couple Google never showed me, tho the relevance level is fairly similar.

      So looks like it may be back to useful again.

    • alltheweb.com can find stuff which Google doesn't - don't know anything about how it works, but two different algorithms are bound to come up with different results. As The Register [theregister.co.uk] pointed out, Google are getting themselves into a pretty powerful position - competition is a Good Thing; we don't want to become dependant on Google, just to let them do a Microsoft on us :) I've nothing against the way Google are going about their business, they're doing very well for themselves and for consumers, but a realist must ask where Google want to go next ... an alternative is a Good Thing.

  • Is google becoming a central point of failure? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mhesseltine ( 541806 ) on Monday December 16, 2002 @02:32PM (#4899996) Homepage Journal

    By that I mean, look at the number of search sites who used to spider for results, and now just re-sell google links. I know that with bookmarks, blogs, etc. the web won't just shut down without a search function. But, what happens when someone hacks the DNS or DDoS google off the planet. Will this affect people severely?

    Would google be an ideal grid computing idea? Would you donate disk space / processor cycles to run distributed google?

    P.S., first post?

  • Clunky (Score:3, Informative)

    by kaizenfury7 ( 322351 ) on Monday December 16, 2002 @02:33PM (#4900018)
    The javascript on their search page is slow and clumsy in Mozilla, but works fine in IE. Strike one against Hotbot.

    • Strike one against Mozilla. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by raehl ( 609729 ) <(moc.oohay) (ta) (113lhear)> on Monday December 16, 2002 @02:50PM (#4900198) Homepage
      Why is IE's ability to process Javascript faster than Mozilla Hotbot's fault? Sounds like a weakness in Mozilla to me...

      • Re:Strike one against Mozilla. (Score:4, Informative)

        by Alric ( 58756 ) <.slashdot. .at. .tenhundfeld.org.> on Monday December 16, 2002 @03:17PM (#4900466) Homepage Journal
        I am not an expert in this area, but I think the following information is accurate.

        MS Internet Explorer uses many proprietary html tags and attributes.

        Mozilla was designed to read all of the W3C Standards for website design.

        If a site displays well on IE but poorly on Mozilla, it is often the case that the designers of the site focused on developing for IE and gave much less thought to being a standards-compliant site.

        I don't know if this is the case with Hotbot, but this is an example of how a website could gain a "strike" because Mozilla does not display it as well as IE does.

        BTW, I use Mozilla 1.2.1 on W2k at work, and I love it. It is so far superior to IE, IMO. The only feature I miss is the Google Toolbar, but Mozilla has a more robust search tab that can be configured more than the Google bar.

        • I use Mozilla. (Score:2, Offtopic)

          by raehl ( 609729 )
          I love Mozilla.

          But I think, at some point, developers have to start supporting what's out there, not blaming IE or another site when stuff that works for them doesn't work on Mozilla. Pain in the ass? Yes... but if a customer comes into your store with a bad southern accent, you don't stick your fingers in your ears and scream "I can't hear you!" over and over again until they speak proper english or leave.

          Or put another way, you can't choose what the rest of the world does. You can only choose to work with it, or not work with it, and Mozilla choosing to not work with it is 100% Mozilla's choice and 100% Mozillas fault. Not liking that the language people actually use isn't the language the standards body defined (or really, that the language people actually use was partially defined by a company you don't like) is not an excuse.
          • If a potential customer comes into your store, speaking Esperanto, you've got to decide if you'll learn Esperanto (a fully-documented human language) or lose that customer. A lot of sites have lost my custom (argos.co.uk is a great example - even in Konquereor, it tells you that it doesn't support Moz-based browsers!) If I can't use your site, I can't buy from you. That's the vendor's problem, not the customer's. As for "blaming IE", that'd be stupid - it's not about blaming IE for being crap - that's IE's choice - but blaming web developers for saying, "It works in IE, 95% of the web uses IE, so that's Good Enough." Fine, I've not got a problem with people making that decision, they can live without my business. It won't hurt them to lose 5% of customers, I'm sure, and it won't hurt me to shop elsewhere. My sites are (mainly) HTML 4.xx compliant, and work in every major browser (Moz, NSCPx.xx, IE, Konqueror, Lynx) - if a site I wrote didn't work acceptably in all of these, I'd rewrite it. The problem belongs to the web designer, not the browser author - all these browsers work with well-written HTML. It's not exactly a difficult language to understand. As for Moz not working with "Designed for IE" sites being "Moz's choice and Moz's fault", if the Moz developers had (and wanted) access to the IE source, they could make Moz work as badly as IE, including all the security flaws released each week. Personally, I'm glad they have a different goal.
            • Right argument, wrong direction.

              Mozilla is the product, the person using Mozilla is the customer. If Mozilla is not going to allow it's customer to use Mozilla to read web sites that the customer can read with a competing product, that is Mozilla's fault for not providing a feature the customer wants. It does not matter how misguided the feature is, only that the customer wants it, and Mozilla doesn't provide it.

              Mozilla folk need to suck it up and give people the features they want, not the features they think people should want.

              • BS (Score:2)

                by sparkz ( 146432 )
                If I'm visiting a web site, I'm actively wanting to be a customer of that company. That company should not care what browser I use to view their website, any more than they care what telephone I use to call them, what fax machine I choose to send/receive faxes from them.

                The phone and fax have defined standards - HTML also has defined standards, but web designers seem to think that they can get away with breaking these standards because "It works with IE".

                At this point, I'm not a Mozilla/IE/Opera/Konquereor customer, I'm a www.example.com customer, who either can or cannot purchase your product. Worse, I'm a www.bank.example.com customer, who cannot pay someone because bank.example.com's web developers are too short-sighted to ensure that all of bank.example.com's customers (including those with disabilites) are able to use the site.

                To say "IE is the standard - browsers must comply with what IE does" when IE is not documented, not secure, not coherent, benefits nobody; especially when a perfectly good standard exists, which does accomodate those with disabilites, and those who choose not to use IE (which didn't even exist until 4 years after HTML was devised) does not benefit browser users, nor website users.

                • Re:BS (Score:2)

                  by raehl ( 609729 )
                  But who says the HTML stndard is any more valid than the IE "Standard"? The IE one is the one used in practice.

                  It may tick you off if you go to the bank and only speak spanish and they don't, or if the store you're at only accepts Visa and Mastercard but you want to use American Express, or if you want to play Americas Army and it's not ported to Linux. Where do you get the expectation that the website has to cater to your rare browser instead of your browser catering to a common protocol?
        • there si a google toolbar for mozilla. The newer versions work great.

        • Actually Hotbot is using xhtml 1.0 strict [w3.org] which is a W3C reccomendation (remember W3C are not a standards organisation unlike ISO) which Mozilla does have support for as well as IE.

          Unfortunatly Hotbot doesn't validate [w3.org] due to they are still supporting Netscape 4 via a Layer tag and a single custom tag which the validator doesnt like either, but they should still be praised for accepting W3C reccomendations and keeping up with browser technology , whereas some [w3.org] search engines or websites [w3.org]don't bother to even try.

        • Phoenix (a subset of Moz, with just the browser) has a "search bar" next to the "location bar" where you can type a search-term and go straight to the results. If you're lucky, typing a search-term into the location bar could get you the "I Feel Lucky" result, but that doesn't work as well.
    • Well, what Javascript exactly is getting fouled up on Mozilla? I'd check myself, but I don't use Mozilla because it's well, slow and clumsy. I'm really curious. Their page is really, really damn simple.
    • I dont know what you're talking about.

      I was using it in Mozilla just fine.

      What version do you have? I am using 1.2.1 (the latest stable) under Gentoo Linux.

      It all runs fine for me.

      Derek

  • search boxes on other sites. (Score:3, Informative)

    by dirvish ( 574948 ) <dirvish@ f o undnews.com> on Monday December 16, 2002 @02:34PM (#4900028) Homepage Journal
    One good thing HotBot did is promote the little HotBot search box for people to include in their web pages. Good promotion of this sort of thing acts as a nice utilitie for web masters and greatly expands their reach.

  • Copernic is the way to go (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MadManRun ( 634740 ) on Monday December 16, 2002 @02:35PM (#4900031)
    Copernic you search all including google and hotbot plus many more. and its free for the standard version and has its own web interface.
    • Except, its Spyware. Check
      http://www.copernic.com/company/privacy/pri vacy-so ftware.html

      ( http://www.fcenter.ru/Software/Miscellaneous/Spywa re/spywarelist.txt )

      Copernic 2000, FOR EVER!, Copernic Technologies, www.copernic.com, FlyCast, , Confirmed
      Copernic Shopper, Beta 2, Copernic Technologies, www.copernic.com, FlyCast, , Suspected

  • HotBot Memories... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Tsar ( 536185 ) on Monday December 16, 2002 @02:36PM (#4900047) Homepage Journal
    "HotBot was one of my favorite search enginges, back in the day."

    Yeah, but now you have to admit, Hemos, that as search enginges go, Google really holds the cake.

  • Tech Support (Score:3, Funny)

    by laard ( 35526 ) on Monday December 16, 2002 @02:38PM (#4900080)
    I used to work tech support for an ISP 4 or 5 years ago and there was always this one customer that would call me saying "my hotbot don't work."

    I had trouble convincing him there was nothing I could do about it.

  • Hotbot Returns? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Cappy ( 36891 ) on Monday December 16, 2002 @02:38PM (#4900081)
    More like hotbot gives up. This is just a front end to better search engines, and you can't even search more than one at a time.

    It's got all these nifty "skins", but who needs a skin on a search engine?

    I say go to the source, and give the advertising dollars to the search engines that actually give you the results!

    • Re:Hotbot Returns? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by LostCluster ( 625375 ) on Monday December 16, 2002 @05:41PM (#4901588)
      Hotbot never was a search engine. From the day it launched, it did nothing but provide Inktomi's results. (Inktomi has always had the odd business model of powering other people's sites while refusing to run an inktomi.com serach engine for themselves.) Over time, other parters have come and gone, but there has never been a true Hotbot search engine.
    • From: http://www.hotbot.com/prefs_skins.asp:
      To choose a new skin for HotBot, you must download a browser that supports Web standards.
      Read More about why this is important and what you're missing.

      Download Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator.

      You are right, who needs skins, especially when they apparently don't understand that Mozilla 1.2 is very understanding of standards, and is Netscape.

  • My first search... (Score:3, Funny)

    by GeneralEmergency ( 240687 ) on Monday December 16, 2002 @02:41PM (#4900112) Journal


    1. Google
    Web Images Groups Directory News-New! Advanced Search Preferences Language Tools Advertise with Us - Search Solutions - Services & Tools - Jobs, Press, & Help ©2002 Google - Searching 3 083 324 652 web pages
    http://www.google.com/ - December 9, 2002 - 3 KB

    2. Google ... ©2002 Google - Suchen auf 3 083 324 652 Web-Seiten ...
    http://www.google.de/ - December 6, 2002 - 4 KB

    3. Google Groups
    Search message board communications or browse for topics by category. ... with Us - Search Solutions - Services & Tools - Jobs, Press, & Help. ©2002 Google - Searching 700 000 000 messages ...
    http://groups.google.com/ - November 13, 2002 - 6 KB

    4. google

    http://www.google.com/custom - October 16, 2002 - 12 KB

    5. Google ... ©2002 Google - Nombre de pages Web recensées par Google : 3 083 324 652. ...
    http://www.google.fr/ - November 29, 2002 - 4 KB

    6. Google
    New!
    http://www.google.co.jp/ - November 11, 2002 - 4 KB

    7. Google ... ©2002 Google - Suchen auf 3 083 324 652 Web-Seiten ...
    http://www.google.ch/ - November 30, 2002 - 4 KB

    8. Google ... ©2002 Google - Ricerca su 3 083 324 652 pagine Web in corso ...
    http://www.google.it/ - November 29, 2002 - 4 KB

    9. Google News ... Health. About Google News. Text version ...
    http://news.google.com/ - November 27, 2002 - 63 KB

    10. Google Toolbar ... The new Google Toolbar increases your ability to find information from anywhere on the web and takes only seconds to ...
    http://www.toolbar.google.com/ - November 9, 2002 - 5 KB

    Previous | Next

  • Google and HotBot Google have different results. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dagg ( 153577 ) on Monday December 16, 2002 @02:41PM (#4900114) Journal
    Googles results are different than the HotBot Google results. Here's an example. I'm guessing that HotBot is using the Google public API's, and that is returning different results than the standard Google results?

  • Not a search engine.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by xchino ( 591175 ) on Monday December 16, 2002 @02:42PM (#4900122)
    It's just a metasearch as it's been said, so basically it just steals the results provided by real search engines. To me that is the equivalent of sticking slashdot in a frameset with your name on the top frame, and claiming you have a new news site for geeks. The only reason anybody makes a big deal out of hotbot is becasue it's part of the terra lycos web portal, you could easily write your own metasearch engine in under 30 minutes..

    Support a true badass search engine and continue using google. Google has become synonymous with internet search engines, and provides USEFUL features (news search, image search, topic centric search engines, and more. I'm sure google isn't cheap to run or maintain, and we should all be damn thankful it exists,(remember life before google?).

    If you use Lycos' "web portal" then fine, use hotbot, ya big cry baby, but please, please, PLEASE don't abandon google by switching to another search engine.. we need google, so support it.

  • Search Engine Competition is Good! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Alethes ( 533985 ) on Monday December 16, 2002 @02:43PM (#4900135)
    It's a great idea to have as many search engines out there doing it as many ways as they can come up with. Unfortunately, HotBot isn't doing that at all. They're just using other search engines' results as a way to somehow put the domain to use and serve ads. This does nothing to improve the search experience for users and will likely only minimally benefit the company itself.

    About the only thing I can see that could be considered innovative on this site is the ability to change the appearance by changing colors or uploading a CSS file. That could be beneficial for branding with ISP install CDs or something, but that doesn't even compare with using the Google API and making something that looks totally unique. I'm not convinced these guys have gotten the word that you have to do something that's really worthwhile to make money on the web now.
    • I'm not convinced these guys have gotten the word that you have to do something that's really worthwhile to make money on the web now.

      Unfortunately, you don't.

      The deal here is simple. HotBot resigns from the search engine game, and serves as a redirector to the survivors. When you do a Google search via HotBot, Google's AdWords ads appear at the top and sides just like on Google. HotBot's owners get to take a cut of Google's ad revenue from such ads.

      CDNow is doing the same thing. They've pulled out of the music-selling business, and now simply have become a glorified Amazon.com Affiliate. If you type CDNow.com into your URL bad expecting the old site, you get a music-focused view of Amazon.com, and CDNow takes a cut from anything you buy when you enter Amazon.com in through their door/

  • Aunt Enginges (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 16, 2002 @02:44PM (#4900145)
    > HotBot was one of my favorite search enginges, back in the day.

    dear aunt enginges,

    it was very nice to see you at thanksgiving at hemos' and i am looking forward to eat at your house this christmas. i asked santa for a new kernel this year, but i have been naughty so i don't know if he'll bring me it. i read an article you might like because it talks about enginges, like your name you know, it is on slashdot, search for hotbox. take care, i love you, eat well.

    cousin vicki

  • I still don't get it.......... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Ride-My-Rocket ( 96935 ) on Monday December 16, 2002 @02:48PM (#4900185) Homepage
    HotBot was one of my favorite search engines, back in the day.

    When exactly was this day that people always talk about?!

  • HotBot has ALWAYS used other results (Score:4, Interesting)

    by flux4 ( 157463 ) on Monday December 16, 2002 @02:55PM (#4900251) Homepage
    I'm not sure why everyone is condemning HotBot's upgrade as a shift to "mere metasearch". The site was born out of Wired Mag's ancient search engine expose article, where they all decided Inktomi was the one to use. HotBot has been powered by Inktomi since day one, they're just offering other sources now.

  • Not Mozilla compliant? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by lanemcf ( 634756 ) on Monday December 16, 2002 @02:55PM (#4900259) Homepage
    When I tried to skin Hotbot, it tells me to download IE or Netscape, and doesn't give me the skinning options. I'm using Mozilla 1.2 (the version I use at work). Not a very auspicious beginning for a brand-new site.

  • less color (Score:4, Funny)

    by DonFinch ( 584056 ) <s2djfinc@@@vcu...edu> on Monday December 16, 2002 @02:56PM (#4900267)
    Aww I'll miss the retina searing green red and blue primary color clusterf*ck they used to be!

  • Non-American users are redirected (Score:3, Informative)

    by McDutchie ( 151611 ) on Monday December 16, 2002 @02:56PM (#4900269) Homepage
    Note that the link to www.hotbot.com in the article redirects non-American users to the version for the country near them, and the versions of Hotbot for different countries don't include the meta-search feature. For example, here in the Netherlands, I'm redirected to www.hotbot.lycos.co.uk [lycos.co.uk]. Non-American users who want to see the search engine reviewed here should go directly to www.hotbot.lycos.com [lycos.com].
  • Interesting new features [hotbot.com]:

    Very streamlined.
    Less crap.
    Easily customized.

    While I don't really know how its search results compare, let's hope that this trend catches on!

  • I realize that I post a lot here, so I've refrained a bit recently.

    But I just wanted to say that someone needs to point out the following:

    Every competitor to Google adds to the amount of spidering traffic on the Internet

    In fact, it's perfectly valid to go one step further: competing with Google constitutes a terroristic denial of service attack (DOS) on the Internet.

    I have a lot of friends. One of them is Inoshiro, who started Kuro5hin.org, a Web site that many of you may be familiar with. I've seen his access logs for that site, and 18% of all hits to K5 are from Google's "GoogleBot 2.1" spider.

    I'll let you do the math -> every search engine adds 20% load to the Internet.

    Do you want to lose 1 out of 5 packets all because of some lame, was-famous-yesteryear search engine called HotBot? What a waste!

  • No^WFew tables! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by HoserHead ( 599 ) on Monday December 16, 2002 @03:14PM (#4900435)
    Check out the source to the new hotbot site. It seems the majority of the layout is done using standard CSS instead of tables.

    This is encouraging - looks like TerraLycos is continuing the work that was done with Wired [wired.com]'s conversion to a table-free design. Too bad it doesn't validate [w3.org], though.

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