Jan 13, 2005 05:47 PM
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(Updated Jan 13, 2005 05:47 PM)
Frankly, I still have no idea what the word 'hotbot'means or what it relates to, perhaps some Mouthshut members could enlighten me on that. But that did not stop me from using HotBot once in a while for my searches and there are several things that I like about it, although, if you read my previous reviews, almost every search engine has a list of disadvantages that I don't really like, and I am not too reserved about outlining those.
HotBot has been considered the most stylish search engine for a long time, with those green, red and black variations corresponding to the color scheme of its parent company Wired News. It somehow pleases my visual nerve and does not jump on you with the audaciousness of the colors, as some of the sites, especially those designed for young generation, do.
HotBot has a really powerful advanced search feature. If you take a look at it, you will be amazed at how many things could be specified there for your search. Want to search for a Shockwave and Java enabled page about ''world's greatest tambourine players'', and want the page to contain all the words, but not contain the word ''widget'' and the page to be in Portuguese? Oh, and you want for the page to be located specifically in Southeast Asia, and you want to consider just those that were indexed by Hotbot before February 28th, 1999? No problem!
The results would be shown as zero for such a strict definition of advanced search, but you can see the point - you can do a lot of things with that Advanced Search option - locate the articles that you read some time, but forgot to bookmark them, read what the scientists thought on the future of computer before 1990, see what headlines Microsoft made in the newspapers when it was still 1991, and other things.
Now back to the disadvantages, or, to put it clear, things I don't like about the HotBot.
Hidden ads is the thing that mostly turns me off. Now, Hotbot is pretty good with the ad policy, don't you think? It's got many banners on the page and it takes a while to load over the slow connection, but somehow they are not imposing, and after you've used the search engine for a while you learn to ignore those.
But if you look on the left side closer to the bottom, they have some links they call ''Search resources'' which you would think to be navigation buttons. Wrong. A click on ''Find Alumni'' would take you to Classmates.com, if you decide to try out ''Jobs and Resumes'', that would take you to CareerBuilder.com, which is I think a little bit fraudulent from the customer's standpoint - you are looking for things to help you search, not the new sites you can go to.
Another thing that is not that great about the HotBot is that the index is not fresh, if you take a look at many Webmasters boards, you will see complaints as for how HotBot handles the submission process - it takes unusually long to get there. The only possible way to get a listing there is get your site in the Open Directory, and that, in turn, relates to the quality of searches on HotBot, which hasn't been updating its index for a while.
After Wired Digital was acquired by Lycos, I thought that HotBot would get many features from Lycos and even possibly be merged, but things didn't work out that way, and HotBot is still a separate entity, drawing its own user base. To sum it up, use it if you like nice interface and not so demanding about the results and freshness of the index.
