HotBot Search Engine

HotBot used to be one of the most complete search engines. Now it mainly provides a portal to other search engines.

History. The following information describes the HotBot search engine from a historical perspective.

Make sure you select the option “Boolean phrase” from the bottom of the “Look For” menu for boolean searches. Key Hotbot search features are listed below:

Search Features

Function

Example

Results

Boolean

space and mars

both “space” and “mars”

 

space or mars

“space” or “mars”

 

space and (mars or venus)

“space” and either “mars” or “venus”. Always put brackets around OR keywords connected to AND

 

space and not mars

“space”, but no pages with “mars”

Wildcards

space and (music or musical or musician)

space and music or musical or musician

Phrases

electric and “fastest car”

includes phrase “fastest car”

Language

zéro

only French language word “zéro”

Letter Case

LaTeX

only words capitalized “LaTeX”. Hotbot only pays attention to capital letters in the middle of words

Links

Select “links to this URL” from the drop down menu, and specify a URL:

http://www.yahoo.com/

All the pages with links to that URL

Additional HotBot search options are described below.

  • Dates. Limits results to pages published within a specified period of time.
  • Media. Return only pages containing the specified media types.
  • Region. Return only pages from the specified countries.
  • Page depth. Enables the user to set the scope of a search at each site