Talk:HotBot

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Information here is a bit stale... right now they only offer searches for "Ask Jeeves" and "Google". Looking at the wayback machine would probably give more insight into the evolution of Hotbot.

Well the problem is that the wayback machine doesn't show the archive for hotbot.com because of a robot.txt exclusion file :(

Robots.txt are the scourge of the internet. I should set up a crawler that ignores robots.txt files. 16:41, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Looks like it is accurate as of now, I just checked it after thinking about using it years ago. It would be cool if there was a pic of how it used to look but that might be difficult. the page for napster has a cool pic of how the software looked back in its heyday in the late 1990s. The guy says he got took the pic in the 1990s when helping a friend fix his computer.

--Jon in California 5 Jan 2008 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 208.127.73.9 (talk) 07:07, 6 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Unique features

As far as I remember, throughout the 90s Hotbot for some time was the first and only search engine giving users the option to search for an exact phrase rather than just individual terms, before Yahoo, Lycos, and eventually Google adopted the feature. If that can be sourced somehow, it should go in the article. --2003:56:6D1B:C637:CDDC:5985:4AE8:58BC (talk) 22:33, 17 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I think that AltaVista also offered phrase search early on. I'm not sure about 1996, but this 1997 help page (in the Internet Archive) of AltaVista already says If you know that a certain phrase will appear on the page you are looking for, put the phrase in quotes. (for example, try entering song lyrics such as "you ain't nothing but a hound dog"). I don't think the feature was unique to HotBot. Myself, I started using the WWW in 1997 and remember phrase search as a normal feature. Gestumblindi (talk) 20:49, 25 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]