I am the founder and CTO of HotLinks. I want to thank everyone for their insights, both positive and negative. I will also offer some comments in response to issues raised in these posts:
First and foremost, I would like to make an important distinction that is often lost on the media, but should be no problem for Slashdot community: HotLinks is not a search engine. We have no crawlers. We are building a web directory, like Yahoo, Snap, ODP, or LookSmart, and unlike AltaVista, Inktomi, or Google. Our goal is not to compete with existing search engines to index the entire web, but rather to create a topical web directory like Yahoo that is more scalable and comprehensive. If you could not find your home page on HotLinks, this simply means that none of our 500,000 users has bookmarked your page yet, not that our "search engine" is broken.
Research done by AltaVista and Google researchers have shown that 60% of search queries are "broad", i.e. only one or two keywords. These common queries are well-suited for human-edited web directories and less suited for crawler-based search engines, which excel at more precise searches. This is why most navigational portals include both a web directory and a crawler-based search engine, and why Yahoo and LookSmart employ hundreds of editors to create web directories manually.
As far as the default bookmarks pre-populated by Netscape or Microsoft, of course we automatically filter those out, as well as anything similar.
Several postings posted out that HotLinks could become too "self-referential". This could be a problem if HotLinks users only bookmarked sites that they found while searching HotLinks. However, this will not be the case. People will bookmark sites that they hear about from friends, that they find on other search engines (including 3rd party search engines that we integrate with our site just like Yahoo or LookSmart does), or that they find by clicking on links from a site they did find at HotLinks. There is no reason to expect that HotLinks users will contribute bookmarks of sites found only through searching HotLinks. Our members' bookmarks can point to anything on the web, even sites in the "invisible web" that would not be found with regular search engines. There are many people who use HotLinks for bookmarking but not searching, and many who use HotLinks for searching but not bookmarking. These two groups have overlap but are ultimately independent of each other.
As far as Slashdot readers who don't use (or organize) bookmarks because they only access Slashdot and two other sites or just type in the URLs by hand, or do use bookmarks but don't need HotLinks because they post their bookmarks on their personal web site or web log, with all due respect, neither of these types of behavior is typical of web users in general vs. Slashdot readers. So even if Slashdot readers don't use bookmarks or don't need HotLinks, all statistics from NFO, Jupiter, Netscape, SRI, etc. show that anywhere from 60% - 99% (depending on the study) of all Internet users use bookmarks. Jupiter Communications reports that 75% of web users online for more than two years navigate the Internet primarily via bookmarks. Studies also show web users having an average of 50+ bookmarks, and HotLinks users have closer to 100 bookmarks on average. These regular web users are also not likely to run their own web sites or web logs.
Slashdot Mirror
First and foremost, I would like to make an important distinction that is often lost on the media, but should be no problem for Slashdot community: HotLinks is not a search engine. We have no crawlers. We are building a web directory, like Yahoo, Snap, ODP, or LookSmart, and unlike AltaVista, Inktomi, or Google. Our goal is not to compete with existing search engines to index the entire web, but rather to create a topical web directory like Yahoo that is more scalable and comprehensive. If you could not find your home page on HotLinks, this simply means that none of our 500,000 users has bookmarked your page yet, not that our "search engine" is broken.
Research done by AltaVista and Google researchers have shown that 60% of search queries are "broad", i.e. only one or two keywords. These common queries are well-suited for human-edited web directories and less suited for crawler-based search engines, which excel at more precise searches. This is why most navigational portals include both a web directory and a crawler-based search engine, and why Yahoo and LookSmart employ hundreds of editors to create web directories manually.
As far as the default bookmarks pre-populated by Netscape or Microsoft, of course we automatically filter those out, as well as anything similar.
Several postings posted out that HotLinks could become too "self-referential". This could be a problem if HotLinks users only bookmarked sites that they found while searching HotLinks. However, this will not be the case. People will bookmark sites that they hear about from friends, that they find on other search engines (including 3rd party search engines that we integrate with our site just like Yahoo or LookSmart does), or that they find by clicking on links from a site they did find at HotLinks. There is no reason to expect that HotLinks users will contribute bookmarks of sites found only through searching HotLinks. Our members' bookmarks can point to anything on the web, even sites in the "invisible web" that would not be found with regular search engines. There are many people who use HotLinks for bookmarking but not searching, and many who use HotLinks for searching but not bookmarking. These two groups have overlap but are ultimately independent of each other.
As far as Slashdot readers who don't use (or organize) bookmarks because they only access Slashdot and two other sites or just type in the URLs by hand, or do use bookmarks but don't need HotLinks because they post their bookmarks on their personal web site or web log, with all due respect, neither of these types of behavior is typical of web users in general vs. Slashdot readers. So even if Slashdot readers don't use bookmarks or don't need HotLinks, all statistics from NFO, Jupiter, Netscape, SRI, etc. show that anywhere from 60% - 99% (depending on the study) of all Internet users use bookmarks. Jupiter Communications reports that 75% of web users online for more than two years navigate the Internet primarily via bookmarks. Studies also show web users having an average of 50+ bookmarks, and HotLinks users have closer to 100 bookmarks on average. These regular web users are also not likely to run their own web sites or web logs.