THE 3 SEARCH ENGIES..ALTAVISTA,HOTBOT AND DOGPILE..

AltaVista was one of the three largest and most important search engines for many years, but it is no longer as popular as it used to be. It had two distinct search modes: Basic Search and Advanced Search. In August 2000, it introduced a third: the Power Search. In Feb. 2002, the Power Search features were added to the Advanced Search page and then in Nov. 2002 were also moved to the More Precision page. There are some significant differences between the Basic and Advanced search pages, as will be seen below. In Feb. 2003, AltaVista was brought by Overture. Overture expected to merge the AltaVista and AlltheWeb databases later in 2003, but once Yahoo! bought Overture, AltaVista's database was replaced by a Yahoo!/Inktomi on March 25, 2004. Use the table of contents on the left to navigate this review.

Database:
AltaVista has a variety of databases:

• Web database: AltaVista's own indexed Web pages including PDF files
• Directory: Open Directory (formerly LookSmart)
• News: AltaVista's own crawled pages (formerly from Moreover)
• Ads: from Overture
• Images: AltaVista's own crawled image files
• Audio and Video: AltaVista's own crawled multimedia files

AltaVista has experimented with a variety of databases in addition to their regular Web page database. In the past, they have served results from Ask Jeeves, their own Usenet database, RemarqUsenet, Overture (formerly GoTo) ads, RealNames Internet Keywords, and Look smart categories. As of Dec. 2002, most of these additional databases are gone, except for the Overture paid positioning results which may appear at the top and bottom of results, labeled as "Sponsored Matches." AltaVista does have other databases available, including images, MP3/audio, video, directory, and News databases. In addition, there are the Altavista Shortcut which may show up at the top of regular search results. These provide quick links to selected popular information.

HotBot, owned by Terra/Lycos, is one of older Web search engines. Originally it just used the Inktomi database and then added Derict hit and the Open directory. Then in Dec. 2002, it relaunched as a multiple search engine with Inktomi, Fast, Google, and Teoma. In July 2003, they stayed with the same four databases, but renamed them HotBot, Lycos, Google, and Ask Jeeves. Lycos was dropped in March 2004. This review covers HotBot using the Inktomi database, which they now call "HotBot." See the GooGle and Teoma (Ask Jeeves) reviews for more details on how their database and interface work, bearing in mind that not all features are available at HotBot. The basic search screen shows no options, but choose Advanced Search for the full range of search features. To see how HotBot used to work, see the old search engine showdown review. Use the table of content on the left to navigate this review.

HotBot offers the choice of three search engine databases:

• HotBot (which is actually a Yahoo!/Inktomi database, and the version reviewed here)
• Google
• Ask Jeeves (the Teoma database)

HotBot is one of the early Internet search engine and was launched in May 1996 as a service of Wired magazine. It was launched using a "new links" strategy of marketing, claiming to update its search database more often than its competitors. It also offered free webpage hosting, but only for a short time, and it was taken down without any notice to its users. Though competitive when it was acquired by Lycosin 1998, HotBot has in recent years reduced its scope. Today the website is merely a front end for third-party search enginesYaHoo, and MSN, as well as Lycos' own lyGo.com. It was one of the first search engines to offer the ability to search within search results. The site still exists, however it is run by Yahoo! mainly.

Dogpile is a meta-search engine that transmits a search simultaneously to several individual search engines and their databases of Web pages. The default list of search engines queried varies. You can also customize Dogpile to search specific search engines. Results are retrieved in lists of 10 hits from each engine queried. If more than 10 results are found, a link to the next list of hits is given. It is important to remember that meta-search engines only spend a short time in each database and may only retrieve a small percentage of any of the results in any of the databases queried.

Dogpile also for me is a best example of search engines for the reason that Dogpile fetches and ranks results from multiple search engines, letting you search for key word, pictures, audio, video, news,or phone numbers