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.
Is google becoming a central point of failure?
by
mhesseltine
·
· 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
·
· 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
·
· 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...
If you are searching for something that is pretty rare, such as a friend of yours, there may not be more than a few relevant pages in the entire web. No search engine covers all the web. It is possible that Google may find one or two results and another search engine such as Fast or Inktomi may find one or two different results. It happens to me pretty often.
Re: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?
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.
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.
Strike one against Mozilla.
by
raehl
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Why is IE's ability to process Javascript faster than Mozilla Hotbot's fault? Sounds like a weakness in Mozilla to me...
Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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!
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.
See charts for twitter trends on Trendistic
Yea, but whats the point, then? If it uses Google's engine, why not just use google?
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.
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.
/.'ers find the stories they submit, or the sites with which to look for stories to submit, via Google?
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
Google's sources for what to consider the top links are influenced by what are presently the top links.
Why is IE's ability to process Javascript faster than Mozilla Hotbot's fault? Sounds like a weakness in Mozilla to me...
paintball