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;28 years ago (1996-05-27)
Current statusWorking

HotBot is a Canadian web search engine owned by HotBot Limited, whose key principal is Kristen Richardson. 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. The domain was sold in 2016 and was used for other unrelated purposes for several years. Hotbot search engine was relaunched in 2022 under new ownership and with a different technology. [1]

Contents

History

HotBot search engine and internet directory in 1997 (as captured by the Wayback Machine archive) Screenshot HotBot Wayback 19971210.png
HotBot search engine and internet directory in 1997 (as captured by the Wayback Machine archive)

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">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.

iCab Web browser for MacOS

iCab is a web browser for MacOS and Classic Mac OS by Alexander Clauss, derived from Crystal Atari Browser (CAB) for Atari TOS compatible computers. It was one of the few browsers still updated for the classic Mac OS prior to that version being discontinued after version 3.0.5 in 2008; Classilla was the last browser that was maintained for that OS but it was discontinued in 2021.

<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">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.

Yahoo! Search is a search engine owned and operated by Yahoo!, using Microsoft Bing to power results.

<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.

Web scraping, web harvesting, or web data extraction is data scraping used for extracting data from websites. Web scraping software may directly access the World Wide Web using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol or a web browser. While web scraping can be done manually by a software user, the term typically refers to automated processes implemented using a bot or web crawler. It is a form of copying in which specific data is gathered and copied from the web, typically into a central local database or spreadsheet, for later retrieval or analysis.

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 for finding relevant information on the Web

A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages and other relevant information on the Web in response to a user's query. The user inputs a query within a web browser or a mobile app, and the search results are often a list of hyperlinks, accompanied by textual summaries and images. Users also have the option of limiting the search to a specific type of results, such as images, videos, or news.

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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 current edition of the browser is based on Chromium. Opera is available on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS. Two mobile versions also exist, called Opera Mobile and Opera Mini. Opera also has a news aggregator app called Opera News with an AI search-engine.

Web tracking is the practice by which operators of websites and third parties collect, store and share information about visitors' activities on the World Wide Web. Analysis of a user's behaviour may be used to provide content that enables the operator to infer their preferences and may be of interest to various parties, such as advertisers. Web tracking can be part of visitor management.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Brave (web browser)</span> Chromium-based open-source web browser

Brave is a free and open-source web browser developed by Brave Software, Inc. based on the Chromium web browser. Brave is a privacy-focused browser, which automatically blocks most advertisements and website trackers in its default settings. Users can turn on optional ads that reward them for their attention in the form of Basic Attention Tokens (BAT), which can be used as a cryptocurrency or to make donations to registered websites and content creators.

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

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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. ↑ "Hot Bot Limited". Dun & Bradstreet. Retrieved 25 August 2023.
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