HotBot has relaunched and now can search Inktomi, Google, FAST, and Teoma. Terra-Lycos, the owner of HotBot, says that with the new HotBot, they want to give the users control. It certainly makes it easy to check four of the major Web search engines from one interface. The front page no longer has ads and flashing banners and pop-ups should be gone from other pages. And the advanced features are readily available and properly translated for each of the four search engines, if they are supported. If they are not supported, HotBot will say that “These filters are not yet supported.”
However, several advanced features are gone from the previous version of HotBot:
- Boolean option for Inktomi searches
- Name search (listed as “the person” previously)
- Truncation and word stemming
- The ability to choose more than 10 results on the advanced search page is gone (and with the Preferences, it will now only give up to 50 hits but Google and Teoma will not even give that many)
- And the “More results from this site” link does not always show up, meaning that when it does not the searcher can only find one page per site
So while it is a good start, I think more work needs to be done. More improvements should come in January when they implement Teoma’s new advanced search features and Inktomi’s Web Search 9. For more information see the What’s New with HotBot page and for a positive view on the changes, Gary Price’s comments.