Hotbot

You can find it at: http://www.hotbot.com or at http://www.hotbot.lycos.co.uk. The UK version give you the option to search pages that are from the UK only.

According to gossip this engine has very powerful search facilities. Assuming you can work out how to use them. It gets search results from Direct Hit and a directory listing from Open Directory.

Basic searching with HotBot

Type in the search terms or keywords that relate to your query, then click on the Search button. HotBot then searches the full texts of the more than 500 million web documents in its database. Adding more query terms is the easiest and quickest way to focus your search.

The search is case sensitive if you enter any letter in uppercase otherwise HotBot searches for matches in either upper or lower case. You can use an asterisk and a question mark as wildcards in your search.

Use the Search filter options to narrow down the search.

By default HotBot searches for pages that contain all the words you enter in the search box. You don't need to put "and" in the search. You can also tell HotBot to find pages that contain any (not necessarily all) of the words you enter in the search or to search for a specific phrase. Check the appropriate radio button.

You can also:

• Carry out the search on pages from the UK and Ireland or the whole web.
• Restrict the search to pages in a specific language
• Serach for pages pages that have been published with a specific time frame
• Specify that pages must include links to specific files such as images (gif, jpeg, jpg), audio files( au, wav, mid), video files (avi, mpg, move, mpeg) or pdf files
• Specify the number of results to display and whether to display long or short descriptions or just the page’s url on the results page

HotBot's results

HotBot searches the web pages and lists the information it finds on a results page. Search lists the most relevant documents.

You'll see the title of the page, a description of the page and the page's address. The result also shows the date which the page was published or amended and the size of the page.

HotBot clusters search results so that you don’t search and find that the top results all seem to come from one site. This means that you get more variety and a better chance of quickly finding something of interest. If your search matches more than one page on a site, click on the "see results this site only" option that appears at the end of each page listing.

To turn of the clustering, check the “Best Page Only” filter option on the advanced search page.

You can click the "open in new window" option to open the page in a new browser window. The results page stays open so you can go back to it.

HotBot also prompts for related searches to help you narrow in on what they are looking for. Do a search and then look just below the search box on the results page:

These search suggestions are based on what other users have searched for. Click on a link to launch a new search. Related searches aren't always available.

If you do a search and feel that have too many results, you might want to narrow down the set of matches you've already generated. HotBot make this easy through a search within feature. Enter the new text and check the “Search Within these Results” checkbox.

You also have options to do a completely new search or to revise your search options.

Advanced searching

In addition to the search filters from the home pages, the Advanced Search provides:

• To include or exclude certain words or phrases
• Restrict your results to pages that were publish in a specific time frame or published before or after a specific date
• Search for pages that contain links to to a particular page or domain
• Pages that must contain all sorts of files such as MP3, video, audio javascript and so on
• Search a specific web site
• Specify how far down a site you want to search. For example, just the top page, the top page and the next two levels and so on
• Turn off clustering. If clustering is on, HotBot only puts a single page from each site in the results list
• Turn on stemming in the search. If you search for "add", you will also get "adding", "added" or "adds".
• Exclude adult content from the search results

HotBot's directory listing

HotBot also has a directory listing that is a manually compiled directory of Web sites. It's indexed by subject and organised according to general, top-level categories, moving downwards to more specific, narrower ones. This structure lets you "drill down" through the categories until you find exactly what you want.

Simply start from any topic listed in Directory: Browse by category on the home page below the search box. The content in the directory is updated every few weeks. You can also click on the Directory tab on the search results page.

The directory is powered by Lycos.

HotBot's multimedia search

The Multimedia Search page looks quite similar to the Advanced Search page. The big difference is that Multimedia Search lets you search in a special multimedia file database that covers more than 4 million media files. This database is updated frequently. Unlike HotBot's Web Search, Multimedia Search spiders actual media files rather than Web documents that contain links to media files in other documents.

Personalising HotBot

HotBot enables you to save search preferences, including the number of results to show per page, the language, and so on. Set your search filter options and the go to the Personalise this page box and click the "Save these setting".