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 |
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|
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