Several months ago HotBot (http://hotbot.com) overtook Alta Vista as the Web's largest search engine, indexing 110 million web pages in comparison to Alta Vista's 100 million web pages. The next nearest competitor is Excite which indexes 55 million web pages.
Even if you're a newcomer to the Internet, you'll have no problem searching HotBot since it offers menu choices for most search functions. Most of the common search syntax and Boolean operators are available for more experienced searchers.
HotBot has a more hands-off approach toward providing search guidance than Excite, Lycos or Infoseek. It doesn't suggest search words, topics or lists of leading sites about your search subject. And it doesn't offer the option of searching for web pages that are similar to a particular result.
Access To The Leading Sites About Many Subjects
Recently the capacity to browse leading sites about 18,000 subjects has been added to HotBot. This excellent feature (created and maintained by LookSmart) is an important addition to a search engine this large. And HotBot's searchable collection of top news sites is very well-designed.
There are links to many features commonly available through major search engines such as yellow and white pages, stock quotes, a shareware-finder, a domain-finder, newsgroup and forum search engines and classified ads. However, there is no special access to weather forecasts, maps, or travel information and services.
How To Search HotBot
HotBot's search system reminds me of the famous beginning of Dickens's novel, A Tale of Two Cities, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." There are many valuable search menus with precise search capabilities available in HotBot, but there are also some puzzling deficiencies.
Menus Make It Easy
The main search box gives you drop-down menu choices which require that your results contain all the words, any of the words, the page title (words must appear in the title), exact phrase, the person (a very limited amount of variants of the name will be found), links to this URL, and the Boolean expression. You can also use the plus and minus signs to include or exclude words, and quotation marks to enclose a phrase.
HotBot's menus make it easy to restrict your results to specific dates of submission. You're given seven menu choices for time periods ranging from in the last week to in the last 2 years. There are also menus for designating the country of origin, types of media (e.g., images, audio clips), and the number and appearance of the resulting web pages.
