HotBot

Last updated
HotBot
HotBot logo.jpg
Type of site
 Search engine
Available in English
Owner HotBot Limited
URL www.hotbot.com
CommercialYes
LaunchedMay 27, 1996;27 years ago (1996-05-27)
Current statusWorking

HotBot is a Canadian web search engine owned by HotBot Limited, whose key principal is Kristen Richardson. According to the website itself, the current domain has been relaunched in 2022 [1] under new ownership and with a different technology.

Contents

The search engine was initially launched in North America in 1996 by Wired magazine. During the 1990s, it was one of the most popular search engines on the World Wide Web.

History

HotBot was launched in May 1996 by Wired online division HotWired, as a tool providing search results served by the Inktomi database. The search engine was co-developed by Inktomi, a four-month-old start-up staffed by University of California, Berkeley students. [2] HotBot was launched using a "new links" strategy of marketing, claiming to index the entire web weekly, more often than competitors like AltaVista, [3] and its website stated it being the "most complete Web index online" with 54 million documents. [4] Its colorful interface and impressive features (e.g. being able to search with any entered words, or an entire phrase) drew acclaim and popularity. [5]

Directory results were provided originally by LookSmart and then DMOZ from mid-1999. [6] HotBot also used search data from Direct Hit Technologies for a period starting February 1999, [7] which was a tool that used click-through data to manipulate results. Inktomi's Smart Crawl technology, allowing 10 million webpages to be crawled weekly, was incorporated into HotBot in March 1997. [8] HotBot was the 19th most visited website based on web traffic as of 1998. [9]

Lycos acquired HotBot as part of its acquisition of Wired in October 1998 and it was run separately, alongside Lycos's already existing search engine. [10] Hereafter, HotBot languished with limited development and falling market share. A HotBot NeoPlanet browser was also released which integrated HotBot and other Wired and Lycos links. [11] At the end of 2002, HotBot was relaunched as a multiple option search tool, giving users the option to search either the FAST, Google, Inktomi or Teoma databases. [12] [13]

In March 2004, Lycos launched a beta release of a free toolbar search product, Lycos HotBot DeskTop, which the company said was "the first product to integrate traditional desktop search with Web search within the browser." The HotBot DeskTop could search the Internet using Inktomi, e-mail folders for Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express, and user documents stored on a hard drive. It also incorporated a blocker for pop-up ads and an RSS News Reader syndication. Indexes created to track e-mail and user files remained stored locally to protect user privacy. Text-based ads were displayed when viewing results for several types of Internet searches. Lycos licensed dtSearch technology to power the local search options. [14]

In July 2011, HotBot was relaunched with a new robot-like mascot, a new logo, and a modern site design. In the beta, HotBot became a portal, returning not just web search results, but also searches from various Lycos websites, such as News, Shopping and Weather Zombie. The portal interface lasted for roughly six months, and these features were instead reincorporated into the 2012 Lycos website redesign, returning HotBot to a simplified search interface.

Sale of domain name

In October 2016, Lycos sold the Hotbot.com domain name for $155,000 to an unnamed buyer. [15] Afterwards, the HotBot domain became home to an unrelated shopping search site, ending the 20 year history of the original site.

In April 2018, the domain was put under new ownership and became an unrelated privacy-focused search engine.

As of 2020, the HotBot domain is controlled by a VPN company based in Seychelles. [16] [17]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet Explorer</span> Web browser series by Microsoft

Internet Explorer is a deprecated series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft that were used in the Windows line of operating systems. While IE has been discontinued on most Windows editions, it remains supported on certain editions of Windows, such as Windows 10 LTSB/LTSC. Starting in 1995, it was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year. Later versions were available as free downloads or in-service packs and included in the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) service releases of Windows 95 and later versions of Windows. Microsoft spent over US$100 million per year on Internet Explorer in the late 1990s, with over 1,000 people involved in the project by 1999. New feature development for the browser was discontinued in 2016 and ended support on June 15, 2022, in favor of its successor, Microsoft Edge.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lycos</span> Search engine and web portal

Lycos, Inc., is a web search engine and web portal established in 1994, spun out of Carnegie Mellon University. Lycos also encompasses a network of email, web hosting, social networking, and entertainment websites. The company is based in Waltham, Massachusetts, and is a subsidiary of Ybrant Digital.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Inktomi</span> Former software company based in California

Inktomi Corporation was a company that provided software for Internet service providers (ISPs). It was incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in Foster City, California, United States. Customers included Microsoft, HotBot, Amazon.com, eBay, and Walmart.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alexa Internet</span> American web traffic analysis company (1996–2022)

Alexa Internet, Inc. was an American web traffic analysis company based in San Francisco. It was a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Avant Browser</span> Freeware web browser

Avant Browser is a discontinued freeware web browser from a Chinese programmer named Anderson Che with the browser engines Trident, Gecko and Webkit the user can switch between. It runs on Windows 2000 and above, including Windows 8, Windows 8.1 and Windows 10. Internet Explorer versions 6 through 11 are supported.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AltaVista</span> Web search engine

AltaVista was a Web search engine established in 1995. It became one of the most-used early search engines, but lost ground to Google and was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003, which retained the brand, but based all AltaVista searches on its own search engine. On July 8, 2013, the service was shut down by Yahoo!, and since then the domain has redirected to Yahoo!'s own search site.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dogpile</span> Metasearch engine

Dogpile is a metasearch engine for information on the World Wide Web that fetches results from Google, Yahoo!, Yandex, Bing, and other popular search engines, including those from audio and video content providers such as Yahoo!.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Metasearch engine</span> Online information retrieval tool

A metasearch engine is an online information retrieval tool that uses the data of a web search engine to produce its own results. Metasearch engines take input from a user and immediately query search engines for results. Sufficient data is gathered, ranked, and presented to the users.

Infoseek was an American internet search engine founded in 1994 by Steve Kirsch.

Yahoo! Search is a Yahoo! internet search provider that uses Microsoft's Bing search engine to power results, since 2009, apart from four years with Google from 2015 until the end of 2018.

<i>HotWired</i> First commercial online magazine

Hotwired (1994–1999) was the first commercial online magazine, launched on October 27, 1994. Although it was part of the print magazine Wired, Hotwired carried original content.

Browser hijacking is a form of unwanted software that modifies a web browser's settings without a user's permission, to inject unwanted advertising into the user's browser. A browser hijacker may replace the existing home page, error page, or search engine with its own. These are generally used to force hits to a particular website, increasing its advertising revenue.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">FrostWire</span> Free and open-source BitTorrent client

FrostWire is a free and open-source BitTorrent client first released in September 2004, as a fork of LimeWire. It was initially very similar to LimeWire in appearance and functionality, but over time developers added more features, including support for the BitTorrent protocol. In version 5, support for the Gnutella network was dropped entirely, and FrostWire became a BitTorrent-only client.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Search engine</span> Software system that is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web

A search engine is a software system that finds web pages that match a web search. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a line of results, often referred to as search engine results pages (SERPs). The information may be a mix of hyperlinks to web pages, images, videos, infographics, articles, and other types of files. Some search engines also mine data available in databases or open directories. Unlike web directories and social bookmarking sites, which are maintained by human editors, search engines also maintain real-time information by running an algorithm on a web crawler. Any internet-based content that cannot be indexed and searched by a web search engine falls under the category of deep web.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Features of the Opera web browser</span> List of software application features

This article details features of the Opera web browser.

Scour Inc. was a multimedia Internet search engine, and provided Scour Exchange, an early peer-to-peer file exchange service.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Opera (web browser)</span> Freeware web browser

Opera is a multi-platform web browser developed by its namesake company Opera. The browser is based on Chromium, but distinguishes itself from other Chromium-based browsers through its user interface and other features.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cliqz</span> Web browser developed by Cliqz GmbH

Cliqz was a privacy-oriented web browser and search engine developed by Cliqz GmbH and majority-owned by Hubert Burda Media. It was available as a desktop and mobile web browser as well as an extension for Firefox itself.

References

  1. ↑ "HotBot - Search Smarter".
  2. ↑ "INKTOMI OFFERS PARALLEL PROCESSING-BASED NET SEARCH ENGINE". Computer Business Review. June 11, 1996.
  3. ↑ Weise, Elizabeth (May 19, 1996). "New Search Tool Hits the Web". Associated Press .
  4. ↑ PC Mag, 22 Oct 1996, p. 48
  5. ↑ "Where Are They Now? Search Engines We've Known & Loved". Search Engine Watch. 2003-03-04. Retrieved 2019-02-13.
  6. ↑ Search Engines for the World Wide Web by Alfred Glassbrenner, Emily Glassbrenner, p. 101
  7. ↑ Crum, Rex (March 22, 1999). "Direct Hit gets searches on target with HotBot". American City Business Journals .
  8. ↑ "Inktomi Powers Advanced Information Indexing". tech-insider.org. Retrieved 2019-02-13.
  9. ↑ Bump, Philip (2010-03-23). "Flashback From 1998: When Altavista, Lycos, And Blue Mountain Arts Ruled the Web". www.themarysue.com. Retrieved 2019-02-13.
  10. ↑ "Website Design, e-Commerce Websites and Content Managed Website Designs". www.uk192.com. Retrieved 2019-02-13.
  11. ↑ "The HotBot Neoplanet Browser". 2000-02-29. Archived from the original on 2000-02-29. Retrieved 2019-02-13.
  12. ↑ "Search engine rankings on HotBot: a brief history of the HotBot search engine". www.websearchworkshop.co.uk. Retrieved 2019-02-13.
  13. ↑ "The return of HotBot". Geek.com. 2002-12-17. Archived from the original on 2019-01-14. Retrieved 2019-02-13.
  14. ↑ Quint, Barbara; Price, Gary (2004-03-22). "Lycos HotBot Offers Free DeskTop Toolbar". newsbreaks.infotoday.com. Retrieved 2019-02-13.
  15. ↑ ALLEMANN, ANDREW (October 4, 2016). "Lycos sells HotBot.com for $155,000". Domain Name Wire.
  16. ↑ "HotBot VPN: Learn About Our Company and Policies". HotBot VPN: Fast, Anonymous, Unlimited, VPN Service. Retrieved 2020-02-18.
  17. ↑ https://www.dnb.com/business-directory/company-profiles.hotbot_limited.f44f81bf8ecbc4e86c6b0dc87746f78f.html [ bare URL ]
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.