HotBot Revamps and Relaunches

Speaking of search engines I don't think about much anymore, HotBot has revamped and relaunched into a meta-search engine integrating FAST, Google, Inktomi, and Teoma.

The URL for the engine is still http://www.hotbot.com/ , and HotBot is still using that funky HotBot logo. From the front page you have a query box and the option to choose from one of the four search engines. You also have the option to apply a different skin (the text-based one is nice) as well as set filter and result preferences. Result preferences, as you might imagine, include how many results you want at a time, whether you want results to open in a new window or not, etc. Filter preferences let you specify what search options you want to appear on the front page. You can put a domain limiting box on HotBot's home page, for example.

Now, this is neat. But this is not the reason you should check out the new HotBot. The reason you should check out the new HotBot is the fact that HotBot/Google's advanced search offers date range search options that you can't get directly from Google. From the advanced HotBot/Google search you can specify results that have been indexed in the last week, last two weeks, etc. You can also specify results that were indexed before or after a certain date.

On the other hand, the Google results on HotBot don't offer everything they do Google. You can't view caches, for example, and I didn't see an option on the advanced page to search for certain kinds of content (like PDF files and Word docs, for example.) The other filters look similar, except Inktomi does offer a content finder and Teoma's advanced search is pretty limited. The new HotBot is nicely-done; I'm going to have to spend more time working with it.

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