HotBot

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HotBot looks like a winner right now. This is because they already have 35.8 million web documents indexed and you can search for them and get results which are ranked with a high degree of relevancy. HobBot claims it has over 70% of the entire web indexed based on their having identified a total of 50 million documents. My personal estimate of the number of documents on the web is closer to 100 million, so I think their spider has to do some more looking. Nonetheless, HotBot is the clear leader today in number of web documents indexed. The only part of it that I can vouch for working pretty well is the basic search and the selection of Match all Words, Match any Words, etc. The rest has bugs, but you can still do some great surfing with this engine. I like the search for URLs and people features. Both work fine and you'll be pleasantly surprised at what turns up. You can get help on the basic searches if you need it. Hotbot also has an advanced search page. Another powerful feature is one that allows you to search for pages with specific types of media content such as Java, ShockWave, and VRML. You can also specify a date range for the search. They don't specify what date they are using, but I assume it is their date of acquisition. This may come in handy because the data base has a very large numbers of duplicate records. This duplication also makes their claim to the number of documents indexed suspect. But I am satisfied that they do have more documents indexed than any other search engine. You may add a URL to HotBot, but I'm not sure what that means. When you search for a URL, it searches only for the exact page URL, not the entire domain, so the implication is that you must enter URLs for each of your individual pages. This service is brought to you by a partnership of HotWired Magazine and Inktomi. I applaud them for making this beta test public. In spite of the bugs, it is still a very useful and powerful search tool right now.

(Last updated 10/11/02)