Terra Lycos Rekinkles HotBot Service
from the more-search dept
I never was a huge fan of the search engine Hotbot, so it had almost entirely fallen off my radar when thinking about the various search engines out there that no one uses any more. It seems that Terra Lycos is trying to bring it back to prominence by relaunching it with a big ad campaign. The new Hotbot lets users pick which search engine they want to use from a list of four of the top search engines: Google, FAST, Inktomi, and Teoma. Of course, looking at the site, you have to pick which one first, as opposed to having it be a meta-search engine that checks them all. A meta-search engine would have been a lot nicer, but the various search technology providers might have been a bit more upset about that. The system uses "sponsored links" to make money, which look just like Google's ads (though, these seem to appear with each search engine that you use). The other potentially useful feature is the ability to build specific filters to go with the search. I could see this being a useful tool for some, but for most people, Google by itself is "good enough".
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