HotBot’s Own Search (by Inktomi) Is Pretty Good

Okay, so HotBot’s main gimmick is the ability to search other search sites. But
what about HotBot’s built-in search engine? It does have one, you know.
The HotBot search engine—the first option in the list of search engines on
HotBot’s home page—is actually fairly decent. That’s because it’s powered by
Inktomi, which also powers MSN Search (as you learned in Chapter 2). The
Inktomi search index contains about three billion Web pages, which makes it
just about as big as Google or AllTheWeb. It’s also good at returning highly relevant
results, and its advanced search options provide all the power desired by
serious searchers.
A little bit of history about Inktomi. It was the Web’ssecond-oldest crawlerbased
search engine, born at the University of California at Berkeley. The
company went public in 1996 and signed up HotBot as its first customer.
Today, Inktomi still functions as a behind-the-scenes search provider and still

powers HotBot’s search results—even though, as you’ll learn next, it’s now
owned by Yahoo!.