3. Owned by Terra/Lycos.
One of the largest web search engines.
Uses the Inktomi database combined with Direct
Basic search screen is simple, but the advanced
search allows for a full range of search features.
INTRODUCTION
4. HotBot Launched in May 1996
Founded by Eric Brewer and assistant professor at the University of
California at Berkeley and Paul Gauthier
it was originally owned and operated by Wired Magazine.
It was a very popular search engine in the 1990s, with it’s wild
colors and great results.
The search results were provided by the Inktomi database and
directory results provided by LookSmart and The Open Directory
HISTORY
5. HISTORY
In 1998 the search engine was acquired by the Lycos Company and languished
with limited development and falling market share.
It was re-launched in 2002 as a meta-like search tool that gave users the option
to search either the Google, Inktomi, Teoma or FAST databases.
HotBot continues to attract a small amount of search traffic and provides results
from either the Ask Jeeves (Teoma) or Google database.
10. Hotbot search engine algorithm is based on:
• keywords contained in the title
• keywords meta tags
• keywords prominence and density in a text content
Document length (maximum 800 words for
hotbot) of any of your web pages.
HOTBOT RANKING ALGORITHM
12. A crawler is a program that visits Web sites and
reads their pages and other information in
order to create entries for a search engine index
A program that automatically fetches Web
pages. Spiders are used to feed pages to search
engines. It's called a spider because it
crawls over the Web
SPIDER AND WEB CRAWLER
13.
14. HotBot offers the choice of three search engine
databases:
HotBot (which is actually a Yahoo!/Inktomi database)
Google
Ask Jeeves (the Teoma database)
DATABASES
15. • Advanced searching capabilities
• Page depth limit
• Advanced search help
• Truncation
• Quick check of three major databases
STRENGTHS
16. Link searches must be exact
Database size shrunk for awhile
Advanced features have not always worked
right
Does not include all advanced features of
each of the four databases
WEAKNESSES
17. No cached copies of pages
Only displays a few hits from each domain with no
access to the rest in Inktomi
Same ads at the top push regular results below the fold
Should have a file type limit for PDF, MS Word,
PowerPoint, and Excel files
WEAKNESSES
18.
19. Default Operation: Processed as an AND
Full Boolean Searching: AND, OR, and NOT
Proximity Searching
Truncation with the * symbol
Case sensitive
Extensive, dynamic stop word list
Word Stemming - Search for grammatical word variants
including plural, singular, and tense.
SEARCH FEATURES
20. Multiple search terms are processed as an AND operation by
default.
DEFAULT OPERATION
21. HotBot offers full Boolean searching.
Use the operators AND, OR, and NOT.
Operators must be in upper case. HotBot can also use
for NOT.
Under Word Filters, it has a drop down menu choice for
All the Words, Any of the Words, Not the Words, Exact
Phrase, and Not Exact Phrase.
These can be used to add additional terms or combining
a phrase search with a Boolean search.
BOOLEAN SEARCHING
22. HotBot and the other Inktomi databases were
sometimes case sensitive for unusual usages of case. If
search terms are entered in all lower case, all upper case,
or with an initial capital, all mixtures of upper and lower
case are searched.
If a search term contains one or more UPPER case
letters in the middle of a word such as arXiv, the search
is limited to only records that exactly match the specified
case.
CASE SENSITIVITY
23. ANY words with charters after the stem will be
matched to your query term if the search engine
supports truncation.
Thus if we stem bird*, our search will match on the
words birdbrain.
Posing bird* to Hotbot we now get this document
Bird
1,834,510
WORD STEMMING OR
TRUNCATION
25. The display includes the relevance score, title, URL, a brief
extract, and date.
HotBot displays 10 records at a time, by default.
However, users can request displays of 10, 25, 50, 75, or 100
records at a time.
More search engines should give such options. To always go
directly to Advanced Search with the default of 100 records and
the 'Boolean phrase' option, make a bookmark to these Advanced
Search settings, or use their personalization feature.
DISPLAY
26. Searching title words and links to a specific
URL
acrobat/applet/activex/audio/embed/
flash/form/frame/image/script/
shockwave/table/video/vrml
FIELD SEARCHES
27. Results are sorted by relevance with
groupings by site available at the end of
each brief record.
The display includes the relevance score,
title, URL, a brief extract, and date. HotBot
displays 10 records at a time, by default.
SORTING
28. HotBot and the other Inktomi databases have an
extensive, dynamic stop word list.
Many common words and numbers will not be
searched.
The list changes as the frequency of terms in the
database change.
When a stop word is in a phrase, it may not be
obvious that the whole phrase is not being
searched.
STOP WORDS
29. WILDCARD SEARCHES
Wildcards searching generally places the symbol "*"
after a word. It tells the database to look for
variations of that word. For Example:
Investigation*
Might pull sites with words such as investigation,
investigator, and investigative.
30. Some search engines allow you to create more
complex queries by grouping AND, OR, NOT,
and NEAR statements using parentheses.
Investigator NEAR (Texas OR Tx)
In the above example, you should pull
investigators in Texas or TX whether the state
name is spelled out in full or abbreviated.
NESTED SEARCHING
31. Page Type –
Default is Any (Any pages)
Top Page (the root page of a URL ie.
www.unca.edu)
Page Depth - Limits how far down a
subdirectory hierarchy Hotbot Searches
These are useful for finding the primary sites for
organizations or information
UNIQUE FOR HOTBOT
32. Smaller databases
Less pointing to external pages
Paid advertising or sponsorship for
visibility
Rise of search only sites
FUTURE POSSIBILITIES
33. HotBot is an interface to advanced web searches, and it
presents a dynamically changing backend.
Both the Inktomi and Direct Hit technologies serve, in
different ways, to provide a relevant list of results
through advanced queries, and both seek to minimize
the commercial influence over search results.
All of these technologies are subject to changes in
technology developments, and changes in the business
environment.
CONCLUSION
34. Its weaknesses include that it still doesn't
seem to produce the depth and breadth of
some other engines, and that it's advanced
features have not always worked correctly.
As the proliferation of this engine's index
and searching features continues, these
weaknesses should be overcome.
CONCLUSION
