HotBot
For complex, carefully targeted Web searches, HotBot, owned by Lycos, is one of the more accommodating search engines. HotBot provides an impressive number of ways to specify what you seek and where to find it. When you're casually searching the entire Web for a keyword or phrase, however, it's not much more effective than the others in this roundup.
When you input a query, the site first displays a list of related queries, then a list from Open Directory, followed by a list from the Web. If you do a simple keyword, phrase, Boolean, or wildcard search, results from the Web are good but not extraordinary. During testing, HotBot handled the natural-language query "Who wrote The Remains of the Day?" quite well, but it didn't find www.linuxdoc.org when we searched on Linux Documentation Project.
The engine's strengths lie with its advanced search and personalizing options. On the versatile Advanced Search page, you can restrict the scope of your query, searching, say, only for pages that contain MP3 files or video clips. If you want to restrict all your searches, not just the current one, you can freeze these settings with the engine's Personalize feature.
Direct Link: HotBot
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