Search Engine Reviews and Search Tips: HotBot and What's New Too

1) HotBot doesn't support truncation (using asterisks to yield many word endings, for example, invest*), nor does it automatically search for the most common endings (e.g. plurals).

2) You can search for words in titles, but you can't search for phrases. When you make words in titles your menu choice, enclosing search words in quotation marks will produce an error message.

3) Most search engines will ignore extremely common words (called stop words) that are entered in a search, for example, a, is, HTML or web. However, if you include a stop word within a phrase, they will search for the whole phrase. HotBot considers stop words inside a phrase to be wild cards, for which any other word may be substituted in the results.

For this reason, entering "a rose is a rose" will yield meaningless results in HotBot, and entering "to be or not to be" (all stop words) will produce an error message.

4) Boolean searching loses much of its value because the NEAR operator isn't supported.

Using SuperSearch

If you can't find what you're looking for using the main search mode, go to SuperSearch. You'll have no problem using it whatever your search experience because you can use menu choices instead of search syntax for every search option.

In addition to the main SuperSearch box, there are two search boxes where you can add or exclude terms to modify your original search. You can search for the word, the phrase or the person, and specify that your results must contain, must not contain, or should contain your subject terms. Choosing should contain will yield articles which may or may not have any or all of the terms you entered in that box.

For example, let's suppose you enter the phrase "income tax" in the main SuperSearch box. After you look at your results, you decide to enter loopholes in one of the boxes for additional terms, selecting must contain, and evasion in the other additional search term box selecting must not contain. Your results will contain income tax and loopholes, but not evasion.

Some of the other menus available in SuperSearch give you very precise ways to restrict the date, location, domain, and media type of your results.

Informative Results

Results in HotBot contain fairly standard descriptions, URL addresses, the date of submission and the number of bytes. The two latter types of information can often give you important clues about the nature

Go To Page: 1 2 3