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Face it. As professional online searchers we've become a bit spoiled. We've gotten pretty picky about what we expect from search interfaces. If a system doesn't have aLl the basic features, plus several bells and whistles, we're ready to give it a "thumbs-down." With Web search engines, however, it doesn't take long to figure out that we may need to temper our traditional expectationsbut also develop some new ones.
Web search engine developers have taken some lessons (perhaps too few) from the traditional services, and they have added quite a few twists of their own. We've had a relatively long time to digest the features, and pros and cons, of traditional services such as DIALOG and LEXIS/NEXIS, but now we are confronted with the need to quickly get familiar with a whole new breed of tool. To paraphrase Lao Tsu, the analysis of a thousand search engines begins with but a single interface.
HotBot provides a good starting point. It is one of the largest Web search engines in terms of URLs covered (54 million); it has achieved significant popularity; and a quick benchmarking (Table 1) shows that it stands up very well against its biggest competitor, AltaVista. It is typical in many ways and unique in some. Plus, AltaVista receives quite a bit of attention in the press, and HotBot therefore has some underdog appeal.
BUT HOTBOT IS HOT
In a nutshell, HotBot is a powerful, well-designed search engine, with a modestly presented, but good list of add-ons. Developed by Inktomi Corporation in collaboration with HotWired, Inc., HotBot provides basic Boolean capabilities, relevance ranking, and decent output options. Virtually all available features are clearly presented with option windows, checkboxes and buttons, making it a good recommendation for end-users.
HotBot is lacking some important features-truncation and proximityand its list of stopwords is problematic for some searches. However, it provides some less common added features, including a strong Save Search feature, "special feature" searching, and searching for "links to this URL." In addition to searching its Web database, users can (separately or simultaneously) elect to search four million recent Usenet postings.
THE SEARCH PAGE
HotBot's search page (the home page at http://www.hotbot.com) uses a series of panels to clearly lay out the options available to the...