Posted by
ryuzaki0
on 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.
217 comments
Worst. Engine. Ever.
by
Zigg
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· Score: 1, Informative
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.
Re:Worst. Engine. Ever.
by
thesatirist
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· Score: 1
Since it isn't using its own engine, you should be fine...
Re:Worst. Engine. Ever.
by
Bob+McCown
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Yea, but whats the point, then? If it uses Google's engine, why not just use google?
Re:Worst. Engine. Ever.
by
thesatirist
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· Score: 1
the only benefit i could see is that you could compare results pretty quickly between multiple engines if you're looking for something really obscure.
other than that, i don't reallly see much point.
No doubt. I used hotbot pretty exclusively until google came along. I think most of the people who say it sucked are those who used it after google was around for a little while and hotbot was grasping, trying to change things around to compete, only making things worse.
Anyway, does anyone else think the offset tables on the main page are a bad idea as far as user interfaces go? it makes me uncomfortable just looking at it.
-- "I have no special gift, I am only passionately curious." - Albert Einstein
You can skin it to "Plain text" if you don't like the offset tables. (I hate them. And GREEN?! What's with the bloody green?!) Just click on the "Skin Hotbot" link. Of course, then you'll have to have a cookie, I assume. Or re-set it all the time.
-Sara
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!
Even though the link they tell you to go to to upgrade to a 'standards-compliant' browser, which INCLUDES MOZILLA in that link, they say I'm not compatible. Can't find anywhere to email them either.
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.
One of my old teachers had us waste some time on the 'internet', she even gave us some urls we could go to. Well one of them was whitehouse.com. I was wondering why it wasn't.gov. I look over to see student next to me that had duefully gone to the site. It was a porno site. Needless to say we didnt get to use the 'internet' much more in that class...
And the benefit...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
of using Hotbot over those search engines directly would be what exactly?
Why not all 4 at once?
by
tbmaddux
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· Score: 5, Informative
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...
-- Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
Re:Why not all 4 at once?
by
stripmarkup
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· Score: 1, Interesting
because they would have to pay all four search engines for the same query.
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. It checks many different search engines are returns the results from all of them combined.
Re:Why not all 4 at once?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
It's actually harder than you'd think because different search engines use different scoring methods, so coallating and de-duping is easy, but sorting appropriately after that is tough.
--Anonymous Coward who works for a search engine company.
To add to the cookie privacy issue, every link on HotBot searches redirects through click.hotbot.com (example that goes nowhere). The redirect doesn't seem to be holding up well either with about 10% of the pages I've tried hanging for 5-15 seconds before forwarding. Google also does QA monitoring, especially if you opt in with the google toolbar, but I've never seen it actually hang going to a search result. Both privacy policies say that personal information is kept private, but Google's privacy policy has fewer cop outs than does Lycos.
Re:Why not all 4 at once?
by
tbmaddux
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· Score: 2, Interesting
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.
-- Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
Re:Why not all 4 at once?
by
tbmaddux
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· Score: 1
... collating and de-duping is easy, but sorting appropriately after that is tough.
Nah! Just sort by the sum of the ranks, from lowest (lowest possible being 4 = 1+1+1+1) to highest, and then renumber. Give the tiebreaker to a particular engine that the user can choose, and let him exclude up to 3 of the search sites. Easy! Get to work.
-- Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
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.
-- "Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
Re:too slow?
by
LostCluster
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· Score: 4, Interesting
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.
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?
--
-- "Karma can only be portioned out by the
cosmos." - Homer Simpson [1F10]
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.
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.
Re:So?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
If you are searching for something that is pretty rare, such as a friend of yours
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.
-- Save Maine's economy: write stuff down.
All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, but my original point a few posts up the chain is that the co-relation is between a old site with a high present Google standing being able to gain more links than a new site which by definition starts with no standing in Google.
Re:So?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Indeed. It made me chuckle.
Re:So?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
More Choices = More ideas = More results gathered different ways. At least that's the theory. In practice, I have a hard time finding results that don't show up on google. The thing's a godsend when looking up obscure motherboard models or other tech #s
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.
Google understands both the idea of context around a keyword that you searched for and the context in your head when you issued the query (assuming you are using Google toolbar). For sure, the way google understands context leaves room for improvement, but this is not an easy task.
In terms of unusual advantages / features of search sites, there's a new one out from the UK-based Onesite.info. They offer what they describe as a "portable favourites" (note the UK spelling) feature, where it remembers your personal links. I've not seen this offered elsewhere!
webcrawler is alive and well, but simply acts as a search aggregator, returning searches from Google, Overture, FAST, About.com, etc.
-- neuro at well dot com
(when I post, it's my opinions, no-one elses)
Is google becoming a central point of failure?
by
mhesseltine
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· Score: 5, Insightful
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?
Re:Is google becoming a central point of failure?
by
LostCluster
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· Score: 5, Insightful
What's more scary than a DOS of Google is a false Google. If Google's database were to be comproimised with false data, it would have a huge effect of directing traffic to and away from sites accross the board.
Re:Is google becoming a central point of failure?
by
awx
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Would you donate disk space / processor cycles to run distributed google?
Yes. Google has given me so much, i'd be happy to do this as a small thankyou. Blimey, gratitude towards a company...
Re:Is google becoming a central point of failure?
by
DeadSea
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· Score: 2
The open directory project is part of your insurance in thise area. The open directory project maintains the largest link collection. If google were to go down, you would set your spider to all the links in the ODP as a starting point and create a new index. If you are really worried about this, grab the dump of all the urls and descriptions of dmoz. Some of us do this every month.
Re:Is google becoming a central point of failure?
by
Pinball+Wizard
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· Score: 2
Will this affect people severely?
Would google be an ideal grid computing idea? Would you donate disk space / processor cycles to run distributed google?
A.
1. Yes, it would.
2. Only if I got paid.
--
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
Re:Is google becoming a central point of failure?
by
mhesseltine
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· Score: 2
2. Only if I got paid.
Would you consider the uninterrupted usage of Google payment, or do you want something monetary? If monetary, what price and how do you want it paid?
Re:Is google becoming a central point of failure?
by
Pinball+Wizard
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· Score: 2
Would you consider the uninterrupted usage of Google payment, or do you want something monetary? If monetary, what price and how do you want it paid?
If the new service was an academic thing, not for profit, I would lend my processor cycles to be able to use it. But in the case of running part of Google, I'd like a royalty for my part in contributing to Googles bottom line.
In fact I think you might be onto an idea that someone will eventually implement. Google's backend is spread out amongst 10,000 PC-class machines. Each of those machines "earns" $100 for every million Google brings in. So a royalty would be fair and if you paid one, you could easily find enough people out there willing to do it in order to make it feasible.
--
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
Re:Must be...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Insightful
You don't the idea is you go to hotbot to use Google's results, see? Er...hmmm, me either.
The javascript on their search page is slow and clumsy in Mozilla, but works fine in IE. Strike one against Hotbot.
Re:Clunky
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
The screen is especially odd in the 0.5 Phoenix. Part of the left side of the screen is missing. I can't see the first few characters I type in their search box.
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 know that this sort of testimonial is sort of worthless in a forum like this, but I have been using hotbot all afternoon (since this story was published on/.) and I'm using Mozilla 1.1 for Windows 98 (on an ancient k6-3+ proc.). I haven't noticed any clunkiness whatsoever. Every page render I've done has been exceedingly fast actually. No crashes either. Perhaps you have a different metric for slow and clumsy?
I have to agree. The page performs equally well using Mozilla 1.2.1, Phoenix.5 as well that that horrible MSIE 6 on my machine. There are no javascript or display problems at all using any of the browsers.
I wish people would get over the myth that Moz is slow and clunky, on my machine MSIE is the slowest in loading Microsoft.com by several seconds.
You must be using the wrong browser -- google searches for me incur a 4 character overhead (well, three actually, but I usually add an initial space)
Under Konquerer (KDE/linux) typing "gg:" in the "address bar" followed by what you want to search for automatically goes to a google result page. [and along those lines, "ggi:" does a google "image" search, "ggl:" does an "I'm feeling lucky" search, etc] This is configurable in konq itself, and actually has a bunch of others pre-defined (which, strangely, I never seem to use)
For example:
fm: freshmeat
av: altavista
hb: hotbot [YES, it's already there!]
ly: lycos
sf: sourceforge
seek: GO.com [why?]
msdn: Microsoft Developer...
Oddly, there doesn't seem to be one for/., but you can define your own if you wish (OTOH, it already takes all damn day to read one article, why oh why would I want to make it easier to get "sidetracked" for another 8 hours?)
Re:WHY???
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
you can set up the same thing with TweakUI for IE for WinXP. Under Internet Explorer > Search you can create an alias to search google with something like prefix: gg URL: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF -8&q=%s
The %s takes the place of anything following the prefix
Bookmark (for example) http://groups.google.com/groups?q=%s then choose 'manage bookmarks', then click on the bookmark you created and edit the properies.
Add a keyword (for example, I use ggg for google groups, to be the same as konq). Then just type 'ggg my search' in the location bar, and away you go.
search boxes on other sites.
by
dirvish
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· Score: 3, Informative
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.
Re:search boxes on other sites.
by
sweetooth
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· Score: 2
They may have been first, and been widely spread, but hotbox disappeared for so long most people will probably barely remember them. Whereas today you see google boxes all over the place even though it's not highly advertised.
Copernic is the way to go
by
MadManRun
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Copernic you search all including google and hotbot plus many more. and its free for the standard version and has its own web interface.
Re:Copernic is the way to go
by
Ilgaz
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· Score: 2
Except, its Spyware. Check http://www.copernic.com/company/privacy/pri vacy-so ftware.html
"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.
Re:HotBot Memories...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Nice.
Re:Must be...
by
cmallinson
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Seriously though, why do you need anything other then google?
Then why do we need anything other than Windows?
Google is great, and I probably won't use anything else in the near future, but it is always dangerous to let any one entity control so much.
Ah, memories...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Back in the day we walked 15 miles through the snow to find one useful result, and we didn't have no fancy DSL neither!
Re:Ah, memories...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
That ain't nothin. We used to have to walk to school 15 miles in the snow barefooted with barbed wire wraped around our bare feet for traction to learn anything.
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?
by
LostCluster
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
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.
hotbot was my favorite engine, but i would always get nonsense when i searched and stuff that had nothing to do with my topic, so hopefully hotbot will be fast and concise so I will be able to switch back
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
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-- "A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
Google and HotBot Google have different results.
by
dagg
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Googles results are different than
the HotBot Google results. Here's an
example.
Not a search engine..
by
xchino
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· Score: 5, Interesting
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.
-- Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
Re:Not a search engine..
by
IIRCAFAIKIANAL
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· Score: 4, Funny
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.
To me, it's like getting people to submit tech news to your site, linking it, and encouraging them to discuss. Yeah, that would be stupid. [/playful troll]
-- Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
Re:Not a search engine..
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
PLEASE don't abandon google by switching to another search engine.. we need google, so support it
Google pulls in over $70,000,000 per quarter from Adwords and paid placement. They're not going to have trouble any time soon...
Re:Peice of crap comes back? great...
by
JVert
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· Score: 1
Aparently it had some hot branding with the techys! in fact so hot that by just listing other engines results they can get./ exposure! I can do google/inktomi/blah blah my site and wont even have to pay for listings! (because i'd never go over bandwidth, because no one would care, cause I dont have techy branding)
This is not capitalisim!
this is commericalisim!
marketisim!
Advertising leads to communisim!
Thats it! i'm going to buy an island, start over, we should have seen it comming when public transportation only got worse as technology improved.
Crap, i'm off my meds, I dont take any pills, too much cofee? too litle? I dunno, cant shutup. I'm a troll, i'm a troll, lord help me.
Re:Must be...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Funny
Competing with Google by offering Google's results? There's an excellent plan.
Search Engine Competition is Good!
by
Alethes
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· Score: 5, Insightful
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.
Re:Search Engine Competition is Good!
by
LostCluster
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· Score: 3, Interesting
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/
The one thing that I really remember about hotbot is that along with being a search engine they used to do email and webhosting too, they were the host to my very first website, I was really sad when they discontinued that...
Aunt Enginges
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 4, Funny
> 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..........
by
Ride-My-Rocket
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· Score: 3, Funny
HotBot was one of my favorite search engines, back in the day.
When exactly was this day that people always talk about?!
Re:I still don't get it..........
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
April 11th, 1998.
Re:I still don't get it..........
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
1BG (before google)
Self-Searching HotBot
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Interesting
I always like to use a search engine to search for itself and see what it comes back with. In HotBot's case:
1) HotBot - http://hotbot.lycos.com - ""
2) HotBot - http://www.hotbot.com - "Wired magazine's search engine, powered by Inktomi, allows users to search within particular geographic or cyber areas."
3) HotBot - http://members.hotbot.com - "Email and Home Pages. Sorry, HotBot Mail and Homepages are no longer available.... "
Re:Strike one against Mozilla.
by
Alric
·
· Score: 4, Informative
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.
Re:Strike one against Mozilla.
by
Cs.Ender
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· Score: 2, Informative
there si a google toolbar for mozilla. The newer versions work great.
-- I know lots of things. Most of them are wrong.
Re:Strike one against Mozilla.
by
thinkninja
·
· Score: 1
Not that I use that myself, just the equivalent in Phoenix. Actually, one of the reasons I like Phoenix better is because you can easily add whatever engine you want to the bar. See http://mycroft.mozdev.org
-- "The number of Unix installations has grown to ten, with more expected." (Unix Programmer's Manual, 2nd ed.; june 1972)
When exactly was this day that people always talk
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
1800's i think.
[Engrish] The Hotebote Returns
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
The Terra Raikosu 'was new, increased' today turned off the Hotebote. Intafeisu was redone courtesy of the result of fast investigation, the Googure, the Inkutomi or the Teoma. " The Hotebote one of the investigation enjiins of my taste, was the back section in day.
Re:Google and HotBot Google have different results
by
jimmyCarter
·
· Score: 2
Doesn't the service have a "hit" cap? I thought the public API came with a maximum number of uses per day. If that's the case, they would probably be using a commercial version of the public API.
--
-- jimmycarter
So what are their political agendas?
by
nurb432
·
· Score: 1, Troll
Now that we have discussed Googles, such as sex ads and gun ads.. what are HotBots' views on restricting legal activites of the individual?
-- ---- Booth was a patriot ----
can someone explain to me
by
ack154
·
· Score: 1, Redundant
Why search engines use other search engines to search? Doesn't anyone else think that's a bit odd? It's one thing to maybe license google technology or something, because it rocks. But using another search engine from a page of a search engine seems strange.
Although, I guess it can be useful if you just want to search for results on other sites without going to a different page, but when google's already the best, why bother?:)
Re:can someone explain to me
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
because google isn't the best.
Re:can someone explain to me
by
ack154
·
· Score: 1
Well then, maybe you can enlighten me to the search engine gods, and point me in the right direction, oh great one...
sorry, I guess that was kind of uncalled for. But really, just in my usage, google is far superior, and I would definitely be interested in testing out anything that claims to rival it.
Inktomi is the same as it always was
by
yerricde
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Since it isn't using its own engine, you should be fine...
Yes it is. What many of us think of as the "HotBot engine" is actually the Inktomi engine, which is still available on HotBot and is in fact the default. (The others are FAST, Teoma, and the yardstick by which all others are measured.)
HotBot has ALWAYS used other results
by
flux4
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
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?
by
lanemcf
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
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.
Re:Not Mozilla compliant?
by
davmct
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
why not use a real browser then? nobody is going to have time to develop the technology to work for every browser on god's earth. get with the program and download IE. its free ya know.
If you just ask, I'm sure someone here can help you find the MS forum that you seem to think that you're in.
Re:Not Mozilla compliant?
by
The+Tithe
·
· Score: 1
That's simply because the programmers for Hotbot decided to go with the useragent that the browswer supplies and assumes that Mozilla doesn't exist. If you get the Mozilla User Agent Override sidebar from http://mozilla-evangelism.bclary.com/sidebar s/ this should allow you to set your browser to look like it's an IE browser, make your selection and then reset your UA string. I did this and set my preference to be text only. Works just fine.
Silly him, he must have assumed that "News for Nerds. Stuff That Matters" meant more than a linux fanzine.
--
- Inventor of the term 'pardon my French'.
Re:Not Mozilla compliant?
by
Shade,+The
·
· Score: 2
Somehow I'm hesitant to take the advice of someone who doesn't seem to know how to use capital letters to denote the beginning of a sentence.
And why use IE anyway? I can't really think of any advantage it offers of Mozilla. Well, perhaps the ability to see badly designed websites, but that isn't really something that is that important. Any website with good content worth seeing is usually designed well enough to conform to most web standards.
If there's something I've missed, perhaps someone could enlighten me on the advantages of IE?
Aww I'll miss the retina searing green red and blue primary color clusterf*ck they used to be!
-- --
Insert wisdom here:
Non-American users are redirected
by
McDutchie
·
· Score: 3, Informative
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. Non-American users who want to see the search engine reviewed here should go directly to www.hotbot.lycos.com.
Re:Non-American users are redirected
by
CBravo
·
· Score: 1
that is funny, I live in the Netherlands and get no such thing. I'm directed to hotbot.com
-- nosig today
Re:Non-American users are redirected
by
McDutchie
·
· Score: 2
that is funny, I live in the Netherlands and get no such thing. I'm directed to hotbot.com
I have been using the same static IP address at Demon Internet since 1996, and as Demon is originally a UK ISP maybe that is why Hotbot thought I was in the UK. <shrug>
So, to revise my statement, it seems that generally users get automatically redirected from hotbot.com to their country specific version if such a version exists for their country, and the detection of the user's location is not always reliable.
Re:Must be...
by
wideBlueSkies
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
>>Seriously though, why do you need anything other then google?
That kind of thinking is what keeps windoze on 99% of desktops.
Nothing wrong with a little bit of competition to keep the leaders on their toes, and to create future leaders.
While I don't really know how its search results compare, let's hope that this trend catches on!
Why are we wasting precious bandwidth?
by
SteweyGriffin
·
· Score: 2, Troll
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!
Re:Why are we wasting precious bandwidth?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
The troll is starting to show his true face. Let's see if the moderators bite.
Re:Why are we wasting precious bandwidth?
by
perlyking
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· Score: 2
Ok, assuming you are telling the truth (which is very hard to believe) then you need to ask your friend to google for "robots.txt".
-- no sig.
Re:Why are we wasting precious bandwidth?
by
perlyking
·
· Score: 2
I don't need to call you a liar, kuro5hin will do it for me. Now moderators, please stop modding him up:-)
-- no sig.
Re:Why are we wasting precious bandwidth?
by
Exmet+Paff+Daxx
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· Score: 2
Google is the number one hitter of K5, for a grand total of 30% of all hits or 1173228 hits total. Please don't post links to incomplete information in an attempt to distort the truth. Google is a huge drain on K5; another search engine as aggressive as Google will cost K5 and every other site like it hundreds of dollars every month.
-- If guns kill people, then CmdrTaco's keyboard misspells words.
Re:Why are we wasting precious bandwidth?
by
Xenographic
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· Score: 1
If it's that bad, why not use robots.txt?
Re:Why are we wasting precious bandwidth?
by
perlyking
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· Score: 2
I don't dispute that data but if its so bad why does robots.txt say google is nice and allow it unfettered access? Two easy solutions, block or restrict access, thats what robots.txt is for after all.
-- no sig.
SCORE -1 REDUNDANT!
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Google ranks pages by how many times they are linked to.
Thats great when you're looking up community-approved 'homepages'.. pages lots of people are likely to link to in order to indicate some sort of 'authority' on a given subject.
But what if you're looking for some obscure page that is more 'on topic' for a given search term than another page which happens to feature all the words of your search and is linked to a million and one times? Google isn't your search engine of choise then.
Other search engines, by using other algorithms, can be vastly more useful than google depending on the nature of the treasure of your hunt.
That's something I hadn't thought about. I might be inclined to agree. Most people look to google as an unbiased yet authoritative source of information. Comprimised records pointing to goatse.cx, etc. would diminish the value of google as a resource.
Re:Google and HotBot Google have different results
by
LostCluster
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Let's just say HotBot is not the site you should be using if you're looking for p0rn.
Hotbot appears to have a more-strict sexual content filter than Google.com, so when you have both sites set to their default setting for smut-removal, virtually every keyword will see more striken results on Hotbot Google than plan Google. However, if you turn off the filter on both sites, you will recieve identical result counts.
However, if you repeat the search with HotBot's "Block Offensive Content" feature set to its lowest setting, Ouchy The Clown is reinstated.
Run on sentence
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
"A New Look
The new HotBot is streamlined. We removed the clutter you didn't want and simplified the stuff you wanted so it's easier to use. "
(...) wanted, so it's easier to (...)
No^WFew tables!
by
HoserHead
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
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's conversion to a table-free design. Too bad it doesn't validate, though.
Re:No^WFew tables!
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Please explain a bit more about using CSS to become tableless. I was aware that CSS was useful for setting 'default' fonts and so forth, but I don't see how CSS makes tables obsolete. Thanks.
The problem is that they are not really competing with google, just slapping a new skin on it and attempting to profit. It doesn't motivate google to make any advances.
-- *The Bill of Rights - void where prohibited by law
Give me a break. If product a isn't as good as product b, who cares about it? Why bother? Should I use the inferior product to promote "competition"?
My comment was 2 short sentences, and you did not even comprehend it before replying. I didn't say that you should use an inferior product. I said that I use Google, and I probably always will. I just pointed out that it is dangerous to have only one choice. If Google stays as is, and continues to be the best search engine, I could care less if they are the only one in the world.
The dangerous part is that if they start losing money, and are taken over by someone for whom greed is a motive, we could be in trouble, having ignored any potential alternatives.
I guess time will tell if it's really spam-proof and whether it'll be bogged down by irrelevant links and dead ends. Altavista got really bad for that, as overzealous online promoters and webdesigners took advantage of the search engine like bullys with the neighbourhood retard. Eventually, Altavista couldn't trust it's own process and started using results from other search engines.
Come to think of it, even I managed to get into the top 2 or 3 rankings in Altavista with fairly commonly used keywords, yet didn't have near the traffic as some of the other lesser-ranked "dotcom" sites.
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.
I also use it, however, when I used to develop sites for Netscape 4 and IE 4, I didn't praise Netscape for being more anal about the JavaScript interpreter, I cursed it.
That is until I learned that IE would grok whatever I threw at it practically, and just realised to develop in the less flexible browser first, then make sure it looked/worked right in the more flexible one rather than the other way around.
Why is Linux better technically than Windows? Because it's more restrictive or because its less? Less right? I'm not sure why that argument is invalid when it comes to browsers.
Mind you Mozilla is what I use at home. There are some areas of clear superiority (i don't have to blindly accept ActiveX - try turning it off in IE), but I don't see the 'only proper HTML gets rendered' approach as technically superior.
I think it would be an improvment if Mozilla would bear in mind the 'improper' HTML that IE allows, and become more flexible in every aspect (how it interprets HTML - even sloppy HTML), not just things like popups.
-- --
If at first you do succeed, try to hide your astonishment. -- Harry F. Banks
Does anyone else think the actual webdesign of the HotBot site looks really ugly? The thin, black-and-white stripes as well as the hypnotic concentric circles in the logo both give me a headache. Also, the offset 2nd box looks really ugly (they should be inline). ALSO, neon green is a really ugly colour (esp. when coupled with that glary red).
White text on blue backgrounds don't exactly provide optimal reading contrast:)
Actually Hotbot is using xhtml 1.0 strict 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 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 search engines or websites don't bother to even try.
Ever notice when you try to validate/. it returns forbidden.... what are they trying to hide? That their site is designed for IE and they're horribly not in compliance?
hotbot
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
hotbot.yahoo!
Mozilla does not support Web standards? ...
by
clubin
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
When trying to skin Hotbot, via stylesheets, on Phoenix v0.5, Hotbot reported the following:
HotBot Skins
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.
Take a look at some of the skins you are missing...
Maybe I should switch to IE, for a more standards-conforming experience. (Do note that this mostly just humor; I'll report it to them that their UA-filter isn't aware that Phoenix is Mozilla)
UPDATE: Before sending them anything, I decided to open up Mozilla v1.2.1 and try it there. To my great surprise, it gave the same error! "Netscape Navigator" did not implicitly mean "all gecko-based browsers"; it truly mean Netscape Navigator!
Re:Mozilla does not support Web standards? ...
by
clubin
·
· Score: 1
Also note that I only assume that the skins are implemented via CSS stylesheets by the "web standards" comment. If they really want to support Web standards, they should at least link to the skins in their HTML as alternate stylesheets, allowing skin-aware users with UA's that provide a UI for it, to manually choose the skins (the skin changes would, until UA's get the bright idea of saving manual stylesheet selections, not be persistent across browser sessions this way, though, and thus should only be relied on for browsers that fall through their filter).
Hotbot's sister-site is standards-compliant Wired
by
starvingartist12
·
· Score: 1
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.
That's too bad because Hotbot's sister-site, Wired News was developed to be standards-compliant and is even using CSS layouts.
Seeing how Tera Lycos would agree to a huge change like that, when the prevailing nature of most large commerial webpages is just IE compatibility, had given a lot of hope for web standards.
The most probable reason for this step backwards by Tera Lycos was that Wired News web designer, Douglas Bowman, who was responsible for its redesign, stepped down and started his own business.
Re:Google and HotBot Google have different results
by
Frizzle+Fry
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Hotbot's Google search for "clown" skips the #1 hit to move to the site for Insane Clown Posse.
Insane Clown Posse isn't considered offensive content?!
I used it all the time until they started hosting crappy pop-ups every time you opened the page (a non-issue now I'm using Mozilla).
The advanced search options were fantastic, and I managed to find stuff - even MP3's - that I couldn't get any other way. Sadly, the "new" advanced search is crap. I'll have to stick with Google - sorry Hotbot.
-- When I am king, you will be first against
the wall.
Just in case HotBot catches on again, I submitted a search config file for everyone's favorite (isn't it?) open source search toolbar: Dave's Quick Search Deskbar. The HotBot search lets you specify which engine to use with a command line switch.
-- Sometimes I worry that I'll develop Alzheimer's disease, but no one will notice.
I used to use Hotbot all time time before Google came to maturity. It used to give me the most accurate and usefull results of any engine. What was really unfortunate is that the search results seemed to suffer seriously once Lycos bought them. I think the engine must've changed. That'll happen in acquisitions: A good product is bought up and suppressed by another.
the choices are interesting....
by
greymond
·
· Score: 1
I thought it was interesting that of the choices of search engines you choose
"FAST, Google, Inktomi, or Teoma" - only one of these sites offers free submissions of web sites. (as in you can submit your site to the search engine without having to pay them)
The plus side to this is that "ideally" if I am looking for a commercial site I have a pretty good chance of not finding any geocities (etc...) type sites in my search if I use Teoma's or Inktomi's search - but then if it's that final fantasy webring I wanted to join the submision free sites like google work best.... of course since the spammer site dont mind paying everyone to list there sites i get a lot of "MAKE MONEY FROM HOME $2GAZILLION DOLLARS" type sites in my results.
hot bot has truly become the lackey to all other search engines...
I don't think it has been improved
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
I've been searching HotBot for the last couple of hours and haven't been able to find this story's dupe. I know there has to be one, as all other Slashdot stories have dupes, but HotBot hasn't rendered any useful results. Guess I'll be sticking with Google.
alltheweb
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
brings more decent results when you are specifically hunting for an exact file name like myfavsoftware_2_0.zip compared to google.
Hotbot does slashdot, Google not?
by
funkdancer
·
· Score: 1
Fwiw, I tried searching for my handle "funkdancer". Inktomi/Hotbot returned a fair few of my posts on slashdot, which google did not. Google did however find some much more obscure pages where I have used my handle.
ps. I only have boring stuff at my site... like pictures of really hot cars;)
On Hotbot's search form, there is a link to Google! Sounds like they're throwing in the towel to me.
How is HotBot working now exactly?
by
vistic
·
· Score: 1
How exactly is HotBot generating these results?
It doesn't look like they're just stealing other search engine's results (as someone pointed out, google and hotbot google gave different results for the same search)...
So are the four choices now on HotBot just a matter of giving the user different options to sort through the same results (like Google for most linked sites and Inktomi for pages with the most recurring words on a topic) or what?
I don't think it has been improved
by
Zen+Programmer
·
· Score: 1
I've been searching HotBot for the last couple of hours and haven't been able to find this story's dupe. I know there has to be one, as all other Slashdot stories have dupes, but HotBot hasn't rendered any useful results. Guess I'll be sticking with Google.
Problems already
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Why I cannot search the fourth at the time? That is too bad
Google does a great job but don't judge it based on the sheer number of hits. Particularly when there are a lot of hits, relevance is more important.
What's Google missing? Sort results by date. I know the dates aren't reliable but sometimes you'd like some indication of when a page was modified. Note this *IS* an option when you search the Groups. The old HotBot would do this. The new one? No.
-- When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras
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 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.
Search engine history and summary
by
onomatomania
·
· Score: 1
This page over at Search Engine Watch provides a good summary of all the major search engines, past and present. There are some interesting historical tidbits as well. The Hotbot section reads:
When HotBot debuted in May 1996, it gained a strong following among serious searchers for the quality and comprehensiveness of its crawler-based results, which were provided by Inktomi, at the time. It also caught the attention of experienced web users and techies, especially for the unusual colors and interface it continues to sport today.
HotBot gained some notoriety when it switched over to using Direct Hit's "clickthrough" results for its main listings in 1999 (see the Using Direct Hit Popularity Results page for more about this). Direct Hit was then one of the "hot" search engines that had recently appeared. Unfortunately, the quality of Direct Hit's results couldn't match those of another "hot" player that had debuted at the same time, Google. HotBot's popularity began to drop.
Even worse, HotBot also suffered by being owned by Lycos (now Terra Lycos). Lycos had acquired HotBot when it purchased Wired Digital in October 1998. Lycos failed to make search a priority on its flagship Lycos site as well as HotBot through much of 1999 and 2000, as it focused instead on adding "portal" features. The company refocused on search in late 2001, making significant improvements to the Lycos site (described above). HotBot's chance at redemption is supposed to come in late 2002. Watch this space!
You may also be interested in SEW's "Who Powers What?" chart, which shows how various search sites outsource the actual searching to the major search engines.
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.
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.
Would you prefer a C compiler which accepted sloppy C code? One which just "decided" that you "probably meant" to initialise that variable?
A lot of people are trying to make money out of, or through, the Internet, (more power to them). If they wrote to W3C standards, tested against them, then it'd work in Mozilla.
The only reason this utopia does not exist, is that IE does not render valid HTML correctly, and - as a bonus - renders some invalid HTML as the developer expected.
This is not a platform on which people can make their business.
Hmm - maybe someone should take MS to court for forcing IE on the world at the expense of Netscape? Oh yeah, they did. But then Monkey-Boy Bush got a lucky seat in the WhiteHouse, and the entire world benefits from continued MS domination.
Dear Florida: Thanks - from The Rest Of The World.
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.
thats right. I don't see what's wrong with tables. And I am an accessibility nazi. Tables render nicely under links, that wired link gave a poor result as links doesn't render css. In fact, that design made links look like lynx.
There's nothing wrong with tables, thy're part of the standard, they degrade gracefully in poorer browsers, unlike javascript or flash or applets.
Re:Must be...
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Here here !!! There's more to searching than google. (http://www.google.com/)
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.
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?
Writers who use a computer swear to its liberating power in tones that bear witness to the apocalyptic power of a new divinity. Their conviction results from something deeper than mere gratitude for the computer's conveniences. Every new medium of writing brings about new intensities of religious belief and new schisms among believers. In the 16th century the printed book helped make possible the split between Catholics and Protestants. In the 20th century this history of tragedy and triumph is repeating itself as a farce. Those who worship the Apple computer and those who put their faith in the IBM PC are equally convinced that the other camp is damned or deluded. Each cult holds in contempt the rituals and the laws of the other. Each thinks that it is itself the one hope for salvation.
-- Edward Mendelson, "The New Republic", February 22, 1988
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
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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.
Hotbot is a metasearch, not much of an engine...
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 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!
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.
Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!
of using Hotbot over those search engines directly would be what exactly?
Plus they dumped at least 10 cookies on me. Google only uses one. I'll keep Googling...
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
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.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
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?
--
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." - Homer Simpson [1F10]
Webcrawler to return from the dead....well, maybe not...
I guess not everything can have a vintage comeback, eh?
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?
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
You don't the idea is you go to hotbot to use Google's results, see? Er...hmmm, me either.
The javascript on their search page is slow and clumsy in Mozilla, but works fine in IE. Strike one against Hotbot.
Why would someone go to www.hotbot.com to do a google search??? they both are 6 letter urls, so it's not quicker to type.... and it's slower....
Yahoo Maps.
competition? or else google would slack off?
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.
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
Copernic you search all including google and hotbot plus many more. and its free for the standard version and has its own web interface.
"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.
Then why do we need anything other than Windows?
Google is great, and I probably won't use anything else in the near future, but it is always dangerous to let any one entity control so much.
Back in the day we walked 15 miles through the snow to find one useful result, and we didn't have no fancy DSL neither!
When Hotbot uses other engines to do thier searches, it seems like a waste of time. I Google most everything and nearly always get sufficent results.
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.
--- If we knew half the things we shouldn't we'd stop wishing we knew it all
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!
I find that my overly plump fingers often type 'hotbot' when i meant to type google
hotbot was my favorite engine, but i would always get nonsense when i searched and stuff that had nothing to do with my topic, so hopefully hotbot will be fast and concise so I will be able to switch back
Down with Google!
Make HotBot your own by choosing colors or uploading your own CSS file.
;)
You mean, I can change the oh-so-ugly-it's-Christmas-every-day-of-the-year colors to nice, pretty ones? Maybe I'll go with a Google theme...
if it uses VRAPS it can't be bad
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
http://www.google.de/ - December 6, 2002 - 4 KB
3. Google Groups
Search message board communications or browse for topics by category.
http://groups.google.com/ - November 13, 2002 - 6 KB
4. google
http://www.google.com/custom - October 16, 2002 - 12 KB
5. Google
http://www.google.fr/ - November 29, 2002 - 4 KB
6. Google
New!
http://www.google.co.jp/ - November 11, 2002 - 4 KB
7. Google
http://www.google.ch/ - November 30, 2002 - 4 KB
8. Google
http://www.google.it/ - November 29, 2002 - 4 KB
9. Google News
http://news.google.com/ - November 27, 2002 - 63 KB
10. Google Toolbar
http://www.toolbar.google.com/ - November 9, 2002 - 5 KB
Previous | Next
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
- Google with 130 results
- HotBot Google with 41 results
I'm guessing that HotBot is using the Google public API's, and that is returning different results than the standard Google results?Sex - Find It
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.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
Aparently it had some hot branding with the techys! in fact so hot that by just listing other engines results they can get ./ exposure! I can do google/inktomi/blah blah my site and wont even have to pay for listings! (because i'd never go over bandwidth, because no one would care, cause I dont have techy branding)
This is not capitalisim!
this is commericalisim!
marketisim!
Advertising leads to communisim!
Thats it! i'm going to buy an island, start over, we should have seen it comming when public transportation only got worse as technology improved.
Crap, i'm off my meds, I dont take any pills, too much cofee? too litle? I dunno, cant shutup. I'm a troll, i'm a troll, lord help me.
Competing with Google by offering Google's results? There's an excellent plan.
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.
The one thing that I really remember about hotbot is that along with being a search engine they used to do email and webhosting too, they were the host to my very first website, I was really sad when they discontinued that...
> 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
HotBot was one of my favorite search engines, back in the day.
When exactly was this day that people always talk about?!
I always like to use a search engine to search for itself and see what it comes back with. In HotBot's case:
... "
..."
... and something in French.
1) HotBot - http://hotbot.lycos.com - ""
2) HotBot - http://www.hotbot.com - "Wired magazine's search engine, powered by Inktomi, allows users to search within particular geographic or cyber areas."
3) HotBot - http://members.hotbot.com - "Email and Home Pages. Sorry, HotBot Mail and Homepages are no longer available.
4) HotBot FR - http://www.hotbot.lycos.fr - "Créer votre. HotBot. Trouver: Aide. Options de recherche
So you get two self-refferential links (good), a dead page
Why is IE's ability to process Javascript faster than Mozilla Hotbot's fault? Sounds like a weakness in Mozilla to me...
paintball
1800's i think.
The Terra Raikosu 'was new, increased' today turned off the Hotebote. Intafeisu was redone courtesy of the result of fast investigation, the Googure, the Inkutomi or the Teoma. " The Hotebote one of the investigation enjiins of my taste, was the back section in day.
Doesn't the service have a "hit" cap? I thought the public API came with a maximum number of uses per day. If that's the case, they would probably be using a commercial version of the public API.
-- jimmycarter
Now that we have discussed Googles, such as sex ads and gun ads.. what are HotBots' views on restricting legal activites of the individual?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Why search engines use other search engines to search? Doesn't anyone else think that's a bit odd? It's one thing to maybe license google technology or something, because it rocks. But using another search engine from a page of a search engine seems strange.
:)
Although, I guess it can be useful if you just want to search for results on other sites without going to a different page, but when google's already the best, why bother?
Since it isn't using its own engine, you should be fine...
Yes it is. What many of us think of as the "HotBot engine" is actually the Inktomi engine, which is still available on HotBot and is in fact the default. (The others are FAST, Teoma, and the yardstick by which all others are measured.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
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.
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.
Aww I'll miss the retina searing green red and blue primary color clusterf*ck they used to be!
-- Insert wisdom here:
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. Non-American users who want to see the search engine reviewed here should go directly to www.hotbot.lycos.com.
>>Seriously though, why do you need anything other then google?
That kind of thinking is what keeps windoze on 99% of desktops.
Nothing wrong with a little bit of competition to keep the leaders on their toes, and to create future leaders.
Huh?
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!
did you read the drivel by hemos?
OH, yes, because competition for competition's sake solves all problems.
Give me a break. If product a isn't as good as product b, who cares about it? Why bother? Should I use the inferior product to promote "competition"?
Microsoft is dominant because they make the best product for their intended markets.
You would have thought that a company like Lycos could have got some better HTML folk. That neon green search button is horrid.
Ok...you can call it a troll if you want. But the point remains the same. Why do you need anything other then google?
That's something I hadn't thought about. I might be inclined to agree. Most people look to google as an unbiased yet authoritative source of information. Comprimised records pointing to goatse.cx, etc. would diminish the value of google as a resource.
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
Let's just say HotBot is not the site you should be using if you're looking for p0rn.
Hotbot appears to have a more-strict sexual content filter than Google.com, so when you have both sites set to their default setting for smut-removal, virtually every keyword will see more striken results on Hotbot Google than plan Google. However, if you turn off the filter on both sites, you will recieve identical result counts.
Google search for "clown" leads to "Ouchy The Clown" whose site has been declared "Mature Content" by Google
Hotbot's Google search for "clown" skips the #1 hit to move to the site for Insane Clown Posse.
However, if you repeat the search with HotBot's "Block Offensive Content" feature set to its lowest setting, Ouchy The Clown is reinstated.
"A New Look
The new HotBot is streamlined. We removed the clutter you didn't want and simplified the stuff you wanted so it's easier to use. "
(...) wanted, so it's easier to (...)
This is encouraging - looks like TerraLycos is continuing the work that was done with Wired's conversion to a table-free design. Too bad it doesn't validate, though.
we need google, so support it.
In Soviet Russia, Google supports me.
(Yes, I am a paid researcher of Google Answers, yes, I will remain anonymous thank you, no, I'm not really in Russia, I was just abusing the joke).
The problem is that they are not really competing with google, just slapping a new skin on it and attempting to profit. It doesn't motivate google to make any advances.
*The Bill of Rights - void where prohibited by law
My comment was 2 short sentences, and you did not even comprehend it before replying. I didn't say that you should use an inferior product. I said that I use Google, and I probably always will. I just pointed out that it is dangerous to have only one choice. If Google stays as is, and continues to be the best search engine, I could care less if they are the only one in the world.
The dangerous part is that if they start losing money, and are taken over by someone for whom greed is a motive, we could be in trouble, having ignored any potential alternatives.
I guess time will tell if it's really spam-proof and whether it'll be bogged down by irrelevant links and dead ends. Altavista got really bad for that, as overzealous online promoters and webdesigners took advantage of the search engine like bullys with the neighbourhood retard. Eventually, Altavista couldn't trust it's own process and started using results from other search engines.
Come to think of it, even I managed to get into the top 2 or 3 rankings in Altavista with fairly commonly used keywords, yet didn't have near the traffic as some of the other lesser-ranked "dotcom" sites.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
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.
paintball
google doesnt have a taco bell banner ad on top, and the hotbot color scheme is much better on your eyes.
-- john
That's ridiculous, Google will always be found at the same, trusted, reliable place: http://www.google.com
Does anyone else think the actual webdesign of the HotBot site looks really ugly? The thin, black-and-white stripes as well as the hypnotic concentric circles in the logo both give me a headache. Also, the offset 2nd box looks really ugly (they should be inline). ALSO, neon green is a really ugly colour (esp. when coupled with that glary red). White text on blue backgrounds don't exactly provide optimal reading contrast :)
The Welkin: Online Music Reviews
Actually Hotbot is using xhtml 1.0 strict 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 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 search engines or websites don't bother to even try.
hotbot.yahoo!
When trying to skin Hotbot, via stylesheets, on Phoenix v0.5, Hotbot reported the following:
Maybe I should switch to IE, for a more standards-conforming experience. (Do note that this mostly just humor; I'll report it to them that their UA-filter isn't aware that Phoenix is Mozilla)
UPDATE: Before sending them anything, I decided to open up Mozilla v1.2.1 and try it there. To my great surprise, it gave the same error! "Netscape Navigator" did not implicitly mean "all gecko-based browsers"; it truly mean Netscape Navigator!
Seeing how Tera Lycos would agree to a huge change like that, when the prevailing nature of most large commerial webpages is just IE compatibility, had given a lot of hope for web standards.
The most probable reason for this step backwards by Tera Lycos was that Wired News web designer, Douglas Bowman, who was responsible for its redesign, stepped down and started his own business.
Insane Clown Posse isn't considered offensive content?!
I'd rather be lucky than good.
The advanced search options were fantastic, and I managed to find stuff - even MP3's - that I couldn't get any other way. Sadly, the "new" advanced search is crap. I'll have to stick with Google - sorry Hotbot.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Just in case HotBot catches on again, I submitted a search config file for everyone's favorite (isn't it?) open source search toolbar: Dave's Quick Search Deskbar. The HotBot search lets you specify which engine to use with a command line switch.
Sometimes I worry that I'll develop Alzheimer's disease, but no one will notice.
I used to use Hotbot all time time before Google came to maturity. It used to give me the most accurate and usefull results of any engine. What was really unfortunate is that the search results seemed to suffer seriously once Lycos bought them. I think the engine must've changed. That'll happen in acquisitions: A good product is bought up and suppressed by another.
I am MuchTall
I thought it was interesting that of the choices of search engines you choose
"FAST, Google, Inktomi, or Teoma" - only one of these sites offers free submissions of web sites. (as in you can submit your site to the search engine without having to pay them)
The plus side to this is that "ideally" if I am looking for a commercial site I have a pretty good chance of not finding any geocities (etc...) type sites in my search if I use Teoma's or Inktomi's search - but then if it's that final fantasy webring I wanted to join the submision free sites like google work best.... of course since the spammer site dont mind paying everyone to list there sites i get a lot of "MAKE MONEY FROM HOME $2GAZILLION DOLLARS" type sites in my results.
IMHO google still works best - at least for me.
Ave Molech Setting
hot bot has truly become the lackey to all other search engines...
I've been searching HotBot for the last couple of hours and haven't been able to find this story's dupe. I know there has to be one, as all other Slashdot stories have dupes, but HotBot hasn't rendered any useful results. Guess I'll be sticking with Google.
brings more decent results when you are specifically hunting for an exact file name like myfavsoftware_2_0.zip compared to google.
Fwiw, I tried searching for my handle "funkdancer". Inktomi/Hotbot returned a fair few of my posts on slashdot, which google did not. Google did however find some much more obscure pages where I have used my handle.
... like pictures of really hot cars ;)
ps. I only have boring stuff at my site
ISO certified == THX certified
On Hotbot's search form, there is a link to Google! Sounds like they're throwing in the towel to me.
How exactly is HotBot generating these results?
It doesn't look like they're just stealing other search engine's results (as someone pointed out, google and hotbot google gave different results for the same search)...
So are the four choices now on HotBot just a matter of giving the user different options to sort through the same results (like Google for most linked sites and Inktomi for pages with the most recurring words on a topic) or what?
I've been searching HotBot for the last couple of hours and haven't been able to find this story's dupe. I know there has to be one, as all other Slashdot stories have dupes, but HotBot hasn't rendered any useful results. Guess I'll be sticking with Google.
Why I cannot search the fourth at the time? That is too bad
Google does a great job but don't judge it based on
the sheer number of hits. Particularly when there
are a lot of hits, relevance is more important.
What's Google missing? Sort results by date.
I know the dates aren't reliable but sometimes you'd
like some indication of when a page was modified.
Note this *IS* an option when you search the Groups.
The old HotBot would do this. The new one? No.
When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras
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 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.
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
You may also be interested in SEW's "Who Powers What?" chart, which shows how various search sites outsource the actual searching to the major search engines.
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.
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
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.
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
Would you prefer a C compiler which accepted sloppy C code? One which just "decided" that you "probably meant" to initialise that variable? A lot of people are trying to make money out of, or through, the Internet, (more power to them). If they wrote to W3C standards, tested against them, then it'd work in Mozilla. The only reason this utopia does not exist, is that IE does not render valid HTML correctly, and - as a bonus - renders some invalid HTML as the developer expected. This is not a platform on which people can make their business. Hmm - maybe someone should take MS to court for forcing IE on the world at the expense of Netscape? Oh yeah, they did. But then Monkey-Boy Bush got a lucky seat in the WhiteHouse, and the entire world benefits from continued MS domination. Dear Florida: Thanks - from The Rest Of The World.
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
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.
paintball
Now all we need is for htobot to come back. That gave me a laugh back in the day.
--Kintara
thats right. I don't see what's wrong with tables. And I am an accessibility nazi. Tables render nicely under links, that wired link gave a poor result as links doesn't render css. In fact, that design made links look like lynx.
There's nothing wrong with tables, thy're part of the standard, they degrade gracefully in poorer browsers, unlike javascript or flash or applets.
Here here !!!
There's more to searching than google.
(http://www.google.com/)
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.
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
Writers who use a computer swear to its liberating power in tones that bear
witness to the apocalyptic power of a new divinity. Their conviction results
from something deeper than mere gratitude for the computer's conveniences.
Every new medium of writing brings about new intensities of religious belief
and new schisms among believers. In the 16th century the printed book helped
make possible the split between Catholics and Protestants. In the 20th
century this history of tragedy and triumph is repeating itself as a farce.
Those who worship the Apple computer and those who put their faith in the IBM
PC are equally convinced that the other camp is damned or deluded. Each cult
holds in contempt the rituals and the laws of the other. Each thinks that it
is itself the one hope for salvation.
-- Edward Mendelson, "The New Republic", February 22, 1988
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