HotBot

HotBot is a Canadian web search engine owned by HotBot Limited, whose key principal is Kristen Richardson. According to the website itself, the current domain has been relaunched in 2022 under new ownership and with a different technology. The search engine was initially launched in North America in 1996 by Wired magazine. During the 1990s, it was one of the most popular search engines on the World Wide Web. History HotBot was launched in May 1996 by Wired online division HotWired, as a tool providing search results served by the Inktomi database. The search engine was co-developed by Inktomi, a four-month-old start-up staffed by University of California, Berkeley students. HotBot was launched using a "new links" strategy of marketing, claiming to index the entire web weekly, more often than competitors like AltaVista, and its website stated it being the "most complete Web index online" with 54 million documents. Its colorful interface and impressive features (e.g. being able to search with any entered words, or an entire phrase) drew acclaim and popularity. Directory results were provided originally by LookSmart and then DMOZ from mid-1999. HotBot also used search data from Direct Hit Technologies for a period starting February 1999, which was a tool that used click-through data to manipulate results. Inktomi's Smart Crawl technology, allowing 10 million webpages to be crawled weekly, was incorporated into HotBot in March 1997. HotBot was the 19th most visited website based on web traffic as of 1998.