HotBot

HotBot is a search engine that was launched in May 1996 as a service to the readers of the online edition of Wired magazine. HotBot was originally based on the Webcrawler of Inktomi Corporation. In the early days HotBot was the then leader Altavista make strong competition; both were among the most popular search engines at the time.

1998 was acquired by Lycos HotBot. In 1999, HotBot recorded 88 million websites, this corresponded to 11% of the then available sites. In September 2002, HotBot captured two billion web pages. After the operation of its own web crawler in 2002 was set as the competitor Yahoo bought up the software vendor Inktomi, HotBot exists today only as a front end for the search engines of Yahoo, Lycos own offer of lygo.com and MSN, which can be used optionally. HotBot is therefore in the search market only marginal.

The HotBot brand is today (2009) the Australian company Melbourne IT.