Web search engine
A web search engine or Internet search engine is a software system, designed to carry out web search, which means to search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a web search query. The search results are presented in a line of results referred to as search engine results pages; the information may be a mix of web pages, videos, articles, research papers and other types of files. Some search engines mine data available in databases or open directories. Unlike web directories, which are maintained only by human editors, search engines maintain real-time information by running an algorithm on a web crawler. Internet content, not capable of being searched by a web search engine is described as the deep web. Internet search engines themselves predate the debut of the Web in December 1990; the Who is user search dates back to 1982 and the Knowbot Information Service multi-network user search was first implemented in 1989. The first well documented search engine that searched content files, namely FTP files was Archie, which debuted on 10 September 1990.
Prior to September 1993, the World Wide Web was indexed by hand. There was a list of webservers hosted on the CERN webserver. One snapshot of the list in 1992 remains, but as more and more web servers went online the central list could no longer keep up. On the NCSA site, new servers were announced under the title "What's New!"The first tool used for searching content on the Internet was Archie. The name stands for "archive" without the "v", it was created by Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan and J. Peter Deutsch, computer science students at McGill University in Montreal, Canada; the program downloaded the directory listings of all the files located on public anonymous FTP sites, creating a searchable database of file names. The rise of Gopher led to two new search programs and Jughead. Like Archie, they searched the file titles stored in Gopher index systems. Veronica provided a keyword search of most Gopher menu titles in the entire Gopher listings. Jughead was a tool for obtaining menu information from specific Gopher servers.
While the name of the search engine "Archie Search Engine" was not a reference to the Archie comic book series, "Veronica" and "Jughead" are characters in the series, thus referencing their predecessor. In the summer of 1993, no search engine existed for the web, though numerous specialized catalogues were maintained by hand. Oscar Nierstrasz at the University of Geneva wrote a series of Perl scripts that periodically mirrored these pages and rewrote them into a standard format; this formed the basis for W3Catalog, the web's first primitive search engine, released on September 2, 1993. In June 1993, Matthew Gray at MIT, produced what was the first web robot, the Perl-based World Wide Web Wanderer, used it to generate an index called'Wandex'; the purpose of the Wanderer was to measure the size of the World Wide Web, which it did until late 1995. The web's second search engine Aliweb appeared in November 1993. Aliweb did not use a web robot, but instead depended on being notified by website administrators of the existence at each site of an index file in a particular format.
JumpStation used a web robot to find web pages and to build its index, used a web form as the interface to its query program. It was thus the first WWW resource-discovery tool to combine the three essential features of a web search engine as described below; because of the limited resources available on the platform it ran on, its indexing and hence searching were limited to the titles and headings found in the web pages the crawler encountered. One of the first "all text" crawler-based search engines was WebCrawler, which came out in 1994. Unlike its predecessors, it allowed users to search for any word in any webpage, which has become the standard for all major search engines since, it was the search engine, known by the public. In 1994, Lycos was launched and became a major commercial endeavor. Soon after, many search engines vied for popularity; these included Magellan, Infoseek, Northern Light, AltaVista. Yahoo! was among the most popular ways for people to find web pages of interest, but its search function operated on its web directory, rather than its full-text copies of web pages.
Information seekers could browse the directory instead of doing a keyword-based search. In 1996, Netscape was looking to give a single search engine an exclusive deal as the featured search engine on Netscape's web browser. There was so much interest that instead Netscape struck deals with five of the major search engines: for $5 million a year, each search engine would be in rotation on the Netscape search engine page; the five engines were Yahoo!, Lycos and Excite. Google adopted the idea of selling search terms in 1998, from a small search engine company named goto.com. This move had a significant effect on the SE business, which went from struggling to one of the most profitable businesses in the Internet. Search engines were known as some of the brightest stars in the Internet investing frenzy that occurred in the late 1990s. Several
Web hosting service
A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their website accessible via the World Wide Web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server owned or leased for use by clients, as well as providing Internet connectivity in a data center. Web hosts can provide data center space and connectivity to the Internet for other servers located in their data center, called colocation known as Housing in Latin America or France; until 1991, the Internet was restricted to use only...for research and education in the sciences and engineering... and was used for email, telnet, FTP and USENET traffic - but only a tiny number of web pages. The World Wide Web protocols had only just been written and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web browser for Mac or Windows computers. After there was some opening up of internet access, the situation was confused until 1995. To host a website on the internet, an individual or company would need their own server.
As not all companies had the budget or expertise to do this, web hosting services began to offer to host users' websites on their own servers, without the client needing to own the necessary infrastructure required to operate the website. The owners of the websites called webmasters, would be able to create a website that would be hosted on the web hosting service's server and published to the web by the web hosting service; as the number of users on the World Wide Web grew, the pressure for companies, both large and small, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities and Tripod were offering free hosting; the most basic is web page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol or a Web interface. The files are delivered to the Web "as is" or with minimal processing. Many Internet service providers offer this service free to subscribers. Individuals and organizations may obtain Web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web hosting service is offered by different companies with limited services, sometimes supported by advertisements, limited when compared to paid hosting. Single page hosting is sufficient for personal web pages. Personal web site hosting is free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting has a higher expense depending upon the size and type of the site. Many large companies that are not Internet service providers need to be permanently connected to the web to send email, etc. to other sites. The company may use the computer as a website host to provide details of their goods and services and facilities for online orders. A complex site calls for a more comprehensive package that provides database support and application development platforms; these facilities allow customers to write or install scripts for applications like forums and content management. Secure Sockets Layer is used for websites that wish to keep the data transmitted more secure. Internet hosting services can run Web servers.
The scope of web hosting services varies greatly. One's website is placed on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few sites to hundreds of websites. All domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU; the features available with this type of service can be quite basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers sell shared web hosting and web companies have reseller accounts to provide hosting for clients. Allows clients to become web hosts themselves. Resellers could function, for individual domains, under any combination of these listed types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may vary tremendously in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers provide a nearly identical service to their provider's shared hosting plan and provide the technical support themselves. Known as a Virtual Private Server, divides server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be allocated in a way that does not directly reflect the underlying hardware.
VPS will be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however virtualisation may be done for a number of reasons, including the ability to move a VPS container between servers. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are sometimes responsible for patching and maintaining the server or the VPS provider may provide server admin tasks for the customer; the user gains full control over it. One type of dedicated hosting is unmanaged; this is the least expensive for dedicated plans. The user has full administrative access to the server, which means the client is responsible for the security and maintenance of his own dedicated server; the user is not allowed full control over it. The user is disallowed full control so that the provider can guarantee quality of service by not allowing the user to modify the server or create configuration problems; the user does not own the server. The server is leased to the client. Similar to the dedicated web hosting service.
Matchmaker.com
Matchmaker.com is an online dating service. Prior to the internet, it operated via dial-in, it was founded in 1986. It is owned by Avalanche, LLC. Members would complete a questionnaire which consists of several multiple-choice items as well as some essay questions where users fill in more specific information about themselves, such as "What are your hobbies and interests?" or "What would you ideal first date be like?" When a user searched for a potential match, matches were ranked according to the percentage of identical responses between the user's responses and those in other profiles. Users could sort their match lists by distance from their zip code to the zip code of the matches. Matchmaker.com originated from a Bulletin Board System created by Gregory Scott Smith in San Antonio, Texas in March 1983. It began as a dial-up system running on a single Apple II+ with a modem. Shortly afterwards, it was ported to a Microsoft Xenix–based Tandy 6000 microcomputer and re-written in MBASIC, re-written again in C by programmer Jon Boede.
It was conceived as a pen-pal network for everyone. There were no the system operated on user donations. In 1985, the system was relocated to Houston and operated on four dial-up lines; the following year, two other systems were networked and allowed users in San Antonio and San Jose, California to join the "date-a-base". The original site started in 1986 was in the form of a Dial-up Bulletin board system; each system catered to a geographic area allowing users to find like interests. The original BBS based system only catered to local computer savvy users within a local telephone area code. However, exchange of email between systems and profiles was implemented using sendmail and uuencoding making uucp and the internet, the Matchmaker network backbone; the Matchmaker network was featured in the first edition of "!%@:: a directory of electronic mail addressing and networks" as one of the larger email networks prior to the rise of the Internet. In 1987, the software became available to franchise from Jon Boede.
The number of local systems grew to about a dozen, became funded by user subscriptions. This business model allowed for each system to be moved into a commercial office environment for stability. In late 1992, the ASCII BBS style was extended to be a telnet-based service, allowing access from anywhere in the world without the need for telephone long distance charges. A year the web-based front end was created; the first Matchmaker system to receive the new version was the largest of the communities at the time, "Christie's Matchmaker". Other Matchmaker franchises also adopted the web based front-end; the site went online in 1996. Phil Moerschell, a founder and owner of multiple matchmaker franchises at the time, acquired the domain'matchmaker.com' and began using it to link to the 15 matchmaker sites he was running. In 1998, each of the franchisees agreed to consolidate and combine their resources. Matchmaker relocated all of the Matchmaker servers to Bedford, Texas. In September 1998, the system became burdened by having to provide direct dial-in over modems and a decision was made to move to the Internet exclusively.
At the height of the distributed franchise model in 1998, the number of national systems exceeded 60. An agreement was reached to centralize in Bedford and incorporate with the name Matchmaker.com. Private stock was issued and there were 12 administrators and employees. Patrick M. O'Leary became the company's president. In 2000, Matchmaker was purchased by Lycos for $44.5 million cash. The site had 4 million users at that time. There were six employees of matchmaker listed in the Lycos acquisition contract as'critical employees' for transitioning the site to Lycos, they were: 1. Jon Boede 2. Phil Moerschell 3. Bobby Dominguez 4. Christie Bliss 5. David Cando 6. Robert Elsner In January 2006, the site was purchased by Avalanche, LLC. but the website still uses the name Matchmaker.com. Carafano v. Metrosplash.com Official Website Backpage Alternative Dating Sites
Wired (magazine)
Wired is a monthly American magazine, published in print and online editions, that focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, politics. Owned by Condé Nast, it is headquartered in San Francisco and has been in publication since March/April 1993. Several spin-offs have been launched, including Wired UK, Wired Italia, Wired Japan, Wired Germany. Condé Nast's parent company Advance Publications is the major shareholder of Reddit, an internet information conglomeration website. In its earliest colophons, Wired credited Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan as its "patron saint." From its beginning, the strongest influence on the magazine's editorial outlook came from techno-utopian cofounder Stewart Brand and his associate Kevin Kelly. From 1998 to 2006, Wired magazine and Wired News, which publishes at Wired.com, had separate owners. However, Wired News remained responsible for republishing Wired magazine's content online due to an agreement when Condé Nast purchased the magazine.
In 2006, Condé Nast bought Wired News for $25 million. Wired contributor Chris Anderson is known for popularizing the term "the Long Tail", as a phrase relating to a "power law"-type graph that helps to visualize the 2000s emergent new media business model. Anderson's article for Wired on this paradigm related to research on power law distribution models carried out by Clay Shirky in relation to bloggers. Anderson widened the definition of the term in capitals to describe a specific point of view relating to what he sees as an overlooked aspect of the traditional market space, opened up by new media; the magazine coined the term "crowdsourcing", as well as its annual tradition of handing out Vaporware Awards, which recognize "products and other nerdy tidbits pitched and hyped, but never delivered". The magazine was founded by American journalist Louis Rossetto and his partner Jane Metcalfe, along with Ian Charles Stewart, in 1993 with initial backing from software entrepreneur Charlie Jackson and eclectic academic Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab, a regular columnist for six years, wrote the book Being Digital, founded One Laptop per Child.
The founding designers were John Plunkett and Barbara Kuhr, beginning with a 1991 prototype and continuing through the first five years of publication, 1993–98. Wired, which touted itself as "the Rolling Stone of technology", made its debut at the Macworld conference on January 2, 1993. A great success at its launch, it was lauded for its vision, originality and cultural impact. In its first four years, the magazine won two National Magazine Awards for General Excellence and one for Design; the founding executive editor of Wired, Kevin Kelly, was an editor of the Whole Earth Catalog and the Whole Earth Review and brought with him contributing writers from those publications. Six authors of the first Wired issue had written for Whole Earth Review, most notably Bruce Sterling and Stewart Brand. Other contributors to Whole Earth appeared in Wired, including William Gibson, featured on Wired's cover in its first year and whose article "Disneyland with the Death Penalty" in issue 1.4 resulted in the publication being banned in Singapore.
Wired cofounder Louis Rossetto claimed in the magazine's first issue that "the Digital Revolution is whipping through our lives like a Bengali typhoon," yet despite the fact that Kelly was involved in launching the WELL, an early source of public access to the Internet and earlier non-Internet online experience, Wired's first issue de-emphasized the Internet and covered interactive games, cell-phone hacking, digital special effects, military simulations, Japanese otaku. However, the first issue did contain a few references to the Internet, including online dating and Internet sex, a tutorial on how to install a bozo filter; the last page, a column written by Nicholas Negroponte, was written in the style of an email message but contained fake, non-standard email addresses. By the third issue in the fall of 1993, the "Net Surf" column began listing interesting FTP sites, Usenet newsgroups, email addresses, at a time when the numbers of these things were small and this information was still novel to the public.
Wired was among the first magazines to list the email address of its contributors. Associate publisher Kathleen Lyman was brought on board to launch Wired with an advertising base of major technology and consumer advertisers. Lyman, along with Simon Ferguson, introduced revolutionary ad campaigns by a diverse group of industry leaders—such as Apple Computer, Sony, Calvin Klein, Absolut—to the readers of the first technology publication with a lifestyle slant; the magazine was followed by a companion website, a book publishing division, a Japanese edition, a short-lived British edition. Wired UK was relaunched in April 2009. In 1994, John Battelle, cofounding editor, commissioned Jules Marshall to write a piece on the Zippies; the cover story broke records for being one of the most publicized stories of the year and was used to promote Wired's HotWired news service. HotWired spawned websites Webmonkey, the search engine HotBot, a weblog, Suck.com. In June 1998, the magazine launched a stock index, the Wired Index, called the Wired 40 since July 2003.
The fortune of the magazine and allied enterprises corresponded to that of the dot-com bubble. In 1996, Rossetto and the other participants in Wired Ventures attempted to take the company public with an IPO; the initial attempt had to be withdraw
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools, the university became the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1912 and began granting four-year degrees. In 1967, the Carnegie Institute of Technology merged with the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research to form Carnegie Mellon University. With its main campus located 3 miles from Downtown Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon has grown into an international university with over a dozen degree-granting locations in six continents, including campuses in Qatar and Silicon Valley, more than 20 research partnerships; the university has seven colleges and independent schools which all offer interdisciplinary programs: the College of Engineering, College of Fine Arts, Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Mellon College of Science, Tepper School of Business, H. John Heinz III College of Information Systems and Public Policy, the School of Computer Science.
Carnegie Mellon counts 13,961 students from 109 countries, over 105,000 living alumni, over 5,000 faculty and staff. Past and present faculty and alumni include 20 Nobel Prize laureates, 13 Turing Award winners, 23 Members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 22 Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 79 Members of the National Academies, 124 Emmy Award winners, 47 Tony Award laureates, 10 Academy Award winners; the Carnegie Technical Schools were founded in 1900 in Pittsburgh by the Scottish American industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, who wrote the time-honored words "My heart is in the work", when he donated the funds to create the institution. Carnegie's vision was to open a vocational training school for the sons and daughters of working-class Pittsburghers. Carnegie was inspired for the design of his school by the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York founded by industrialist Charles Pratt in 1887. In 1912, the institution changed its name to Carnegie Institute of Technology and began offering four-year degrees.
During this time, CIT consisted of four constituent schools: the School of Fine and Applied Arts, the School of Apprentices and Journeymen, the School of Science and Technology, the Margaret Morrison Carnegie School for Women. The Mellon Institute of Industrial Research was founded in 1913 by a banker and industrialist brothers Andrew and Richard B. Mellon in honor of their father, Thomas Mellon, the patriarch of the Mellon family; the Institute began as a research organization which performed work for government and industry on a contract and was established as a department within the University of Pittsburgh. In 1927, the Mellon Institute incorporated as an independent nonprofit. In 1938, the Mellon Institute's iconic building was completed and it moved to its new, current, location on Fifth Avenue. In 1967, with support from Paul Mellon, Carnegie Tech merged with the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research to become Carnegie Mellon University. Carnegie Mellon's coordinate women's college, the Margaret Morrison Carnegie College closed in 1973 and merged its academic programs with the rest of the university.
The industrial research mission of the Mellon Institute survived the merger as the Carnegie Mellon Research Institute and continued doing work on contract to industry and government. CMRI closed in 2001 and its programs were subsumed by other parts of the university or spun off into autonomous entities. Carnegie Mellon's 140-acre main campus is three miles from downtown Pittsburgh, between Schenley Park and the Squirrel Hill and Oakland neighborhoods. Carnegie Mellon is bordered to the west by the campus of the University of Pittsburgh. Carnegie Mellon owns 81 buildings in the Squirrel Hill neighborhoods of Pittsburgh. For decades the center of student life on campus was the University's student union. Built in the 1950s, Skibo Hall's design was typical of Mid-Century Modern architecture, but was poorly equipped to deal with advances in computer and internet connectivity; the original Skibo was razed in the summer of 1994 and replaced by a new student union, wi-fi enabled. Known as University Center, the building was dedicated in 1996.
In 2014, Carnegie Mellon re-dedicated the University Center as the Cohon University Center in recognition of the eighth president of the university, Jared Cohon. A large grassy area known as "the Cut" forms the backbone of the campus, with a separate grassy area known as "the Mall" running perpendicular; the Cut was formed by filling in a ravine with soil from a nearby hill, leveled to build the College of Fine Arts building. The northwestern part of the campus was acquired from the United States Bureau of Mines in the 1980s. In 2006, Carnegie Mellon Trustee Jill Gansman Kraus donated the 80-foot -tall sculpture Walking to the Sky, placed on the lawn facing Forbes Ave between the Cohon University Center and Warner Hall; the sculpture was controversial for its placement, the general lack of input that the campus community had, its aesthetic appeal. In April 2015, Carnegie Mellon University, in collaboration with Jones Lang LaSalle, announced the planning of a second office space structure, alongside the Robert Mehrabian Collaborative Innovation Center, an upscale and full-service hotel, retail and dining development along Forbes Avenue.
This complex will connect to the Tepper Quadrangle, the Heinz College, the Tata Consultancy Services Building, the Gates-Hillman Center to create an innovation corridor on the university campus. The eff
Internet
The Internet is the global system of interconnected computer networks that use the Internet protocol suite to link devices worldwide. It is a network of networks that consists of private, academic and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic and optical networking technologies; the Internet carries a vast range of information resources and services, such as the inter-linked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web, electronic mail and file sharing. Some publications no longer capitalize "internet"; the origins of the Internet date back to research commissioned by the federal government of the United States in the 1960s to build robust, fault-tolerant communication with computer networks. The primary precursor network, the ARPANET served as a backbone for interconnection of regional academic and military networks in the 1980s; the funding of the National Science Foundation Network as a new backbone in the 1980s, as well as private funding for other commercial extensions, led to worldwide participation in the development of new networking technologies, the merger of many networks.
The linking of commercial networks and enterprises by the early 1990s marked the beginning of the transition to the modern Internet, generated a sustained exponential growth as generations of institutional and mobile computers were connected to the network. Although the Internet was used by academia since the 1980s, commercialization incorporated its services and technologies into every aspect of modern life. Most traditional communication media, including telephony, television, paper mail and newspapers are reshaped, redefined, or bypassed by the Internet, giving birth to new services such as email, Internet telephony, Internet television, online music, digital newspapers, video streaming websites. Newspaper and other print publishing are adapting to website technology, or are reshaped into blogging, web feeds and online news aggregators; the Internet has enabled and accelerated new forms of personal interactions through instant messaging, Internet forums, social networking. Online shopping has grown exponentially both for major retailers and small businesses and entrepreneurs, as it enables firms to extend their "brick and mortar" presence to serve a larger market or sell goods and services online.
Business-to-business and financial services on the Internet affect supply chains across entire industries. The Internet has no single centralized governance in either technological implementation or policies for access and usage; the overreaching definitions of the two principal name spaces in the Internet, the Internet Protocol address space and the Domain Name System, are directed by a maintainer organization, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. The technical underpinning and standardization of the core protocols is an activity of the Internet Engineering Task Force, a non-profit organization of loosely affiliated international participants that anyone may associate with by contributing technical expertise. In November 2006, the Internet was included on USA Today's list of New Seven Wonders; when the term Internet is used to refer to the specific global system of interconnected Internet Protocol networks, the word is a proper noun that should be written with an initial capital letter.
In common use and the media, it is erroneously not capitalized, viz. the internet. Some guides specify that the word should be capitalized when used as a noun, but not capitalized when used as an adjective; the Internet is often referred to as the Net, as a short form of network. As early as 1849, the word internetted was used uncapitalized as an adjective, meaning interconnected or interwoven; the designers of early computer networks used internet both as a noun and as a verb in shorthand form of internetwork or internetworking, meaning interconnecting computer networks. The terms Internet and World Wide Web are used interchangeably in everyday speech. However, the World Wide Web or the Web is only one of a large number of Internet services; the Web is a collection of interconnected documents and other web resources, linked by hyperlinks and URLs. As another point of comparison, Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP, is the language used on the Web for information transfer, yet it is just one of many languages or protocols that can be used for communication on the Internet.
The term Interweb is a portmanteau of Internet and World Wide Web used sarcastically to parody a technically unsavvy user. Research into packet switching, one of the fundamental Internet technologies, started in the early 1960s in the work of Paul Baran and Donald Davies. Packet-switched networks such as the NPL network, ARPANET, the Merit Network, CYCLADES, Telenet were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s; the ARPANET project led to the development of protocols for internetworking, by which multiple separate networks could be joined into a network of networks. ARPANET development began with two network nodes which were interconnected between the Network Measurement Center at the University of California, Los Angeles Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science directed by Leonard Kleinrock, the NLS system at SRI International by Douglas Engelbart in Menlo Park, California, on 29 October 1969; the third site was the Culler-Fried Interactive Mathematics Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, followed by the University of
HotBot
HotBot is a owned web search engine using Bing search for its search results. HotBot was launched in May 1996 by HotWired, a tool providing search results served by the Inktomi database; the search engine was co-developed by Inktomi, a four-month-old start-up staffed by University of California, Berkeley students. HotBot was launched using a "new links" strategy of marketing, claiming to index the entire web weekly, more than competitors like AltaVista, its website stated it being the "most complete Web index online" with 54 million documents, its colorful interface and impressive features drew popularity. Directory results were provided by LookSmart and DMOZ from mid-1999. HotBot used search data from Direct Hit Technologies for a period starting February 1999, a tool that used click-through data to manipulate results. Inktomi's SmartCrawl technology, allowing 10 million webpages to be crawled weekly, was incorporated into HotBot in March 1997. HotBot was the 19th most visited website based on web traffic as of 1998.
Lycos acquired HotBot as part of its acquisition of Wired magazine in October 1998 and it was run separately, alongside Lycos's existing search engine. Hereafter, HotBot languished with falling market share. A HotBot NeoPlanet browser was released which integrated HotBot and other Wired and Lycos links. At the end of 2002, HotBot was relaunched as a multiple option search tool, giving users the option to search either the FAST, Inktomi or Teoma databases. In March 2004, Lycos launched a beta release of a free toolbar search product, Lycos HotBot DeskTop, which the company said was "the first product to integrate traditional desktop search with Web search within the browser." The HotBot DeskTop could search the Internet using Inktomi, e-mail folders for Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express, user documents stored on a hard drive. It incorporated a blocker for pop-up ads and an RSS News Reader syndication. Indexes created to track e-mail and user files remained stored locally to protect user privacy.
Text-based ads were displayed. Lycos licensed dtSearch technology to power the local search options. In July 2011, HotBot was relaunched with a new robot-like mascot, a new logo, a modern site design. In the beta, HotBot became a portal, returning not just web search results, but searches from various Lycos websites, such as News and Weather Zombie; the portal interface lasted for six months, these features were instead reincorporated into the 2012 Lycos website redesign, returning HotBot to a simplified search interface. In October 2016, Lycos sold the Hotbot.com domain name for $155,000 to an unnamed buyer. Afterwards, HotBot transformed into a shopping and money search site, got a new logo. In April 2018, the classic HotBot look and design returned, it turned into a privacy-focused search engine. Official website
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