Hot Bot

Hot Bot is the hilarious journey of two sexually repressed and unpopular teenage geeks who accidentally discover a life-like super-model sex bot (Bardot).

Director: Michael Polish

Mark Polish ... (writer)

Mark Polish

Michael Polish ... (co-writer)

Michael Polish

Cast 

Zack Pearlman , Doug Haley , Cynthia Kirchner ,  David Shackelford , Anthony Anderson ,

Donald Faison ,    Danny Masterson ,  Larry Miller ,  Angela Kinsey , Kirby Bliss Blanton ,  

John Robinson , Arianna Jaffier

Hot Bot became a popular tool with search results served by the Inktomi database and directory results provided originally by LookSmart and then DMOZ since mid-1999. Hot bot also used search data from Direct Hit for a period, which was a tool that used click-through data to manipulate results. 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. It was one of the first search engines to offer the ability to search within search results.

Lycos acquired Hot Bot in 1998 and for a number of years Hot Bot languished with limited development and falling market share. At the end of 2002 Hot Bot was relaunched as a multiple option search tool, giving users the option to search either the FAST, Google, Inktomi or Teoma databases.

In July 2011, Hot Bot was relaunched with a new robot-like mascot, a new logo, and a modern site design. In the beta, Hot Bot became a portal, returning not just web search results, but also searches from various Lycos websites, such as News, Shopping and Weather Zombie. The portal interface lasted for roughly 6 months, and these features were instead reincorporated into the 2012 Lycos website redesign, returning Hot Bot to a simplified search interface.

In early 2004 Lycos launched a beta release of a free toolbar search product, Lycos Hot Bot Desk Top, which the company said was "the first product to integrate traditional desktop search with Web search within the browser." The Hot Bot Desk Top could search the Internet using Inktomi, e-mail folders for Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express, and user documents stored on a hard drive. It also 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 when viewing results for several types of Internet searches. Lycos licensed search technology to power the local search options.