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.
Worst. Engine. Ever.
by
Zigg
·
· 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.
Why not all 4 at once?
by
tbmaddux
·
· 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?
The javascript on their search page is slow and clumsy in Mozilla, but works fine in IE. Strike one against Hotbot.
search boxes on other sites.
by
dirvish
·
· 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.
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.)
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: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.
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.
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.
-- "Old man yells at systemd"
Re:Strike one against Mozilla.
by
Cs.Ender
·
· Score: 2, Informative
there si a google toolbar for mozilla. The newer versions work great.
Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?
The javascript on their search page is slow and clumsy in Mozilla, but works fine in IE. Strike one against Hotbot.
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.,
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?
Yahoo Maps.
Which you can access through Google. Google is also nice enough to give you the choice of MapQuest, if you'd prefer it over Yahoo Maps for any reason.
I write in my journal
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.
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.
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.
Google ranks pages by how many times they are linked to.
.. pages lots of people are likely to link to in order to indicate some sort of 'authority' on a given subject.
Thats great when you're looking up community-approved 'homepages'
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.
"Old man yells at systemd"
there si a google toolbar for mozilla. The newer versions work great.
I know lots of things. Most of them are wrong.