Scope
Slurp, the Web crawler, indexes
about 110+ million sites. It provides
a good collection of features in a single
easy-to-use interface. Timely reindexing
of sites provides more updated sites
than many search engines.
Interface
A customizable forms-based
single interface for simple searches
lets you modify a search term from a
drop-down list. Choose advanced search
options and you have even more choices.
You can limit the search to specific
domains (such as .com or .org), geographic
locations, very specific choices of
media types and technologies, time periods
and specified page depth. HotBot offers
a language limit for nine languages,
a personal page limit, and a check box
for word stemming providing word variants
of a search term.
Logic
- Truncation is available for one
letter by using the question mark,
however, it offers left-hand truncation
by using the asterisk.
- It allows specifying phrase searching
or you can use quotation marks around
a phrase.
- Boolean searches are supported through
the menu options or using AND the
default word, OR and NOT.
- Matches any usage of uppercase characters
with search terms.
- Searching for specific technologies
on pages that contain Java, Javascript,
VRML (3 D), Acrobat, Shockwave, ActiveX,
MP3, audio, video or image files is
possible in advanced search.
Results
Relevancy of results is based
on several factors: word frequency,
number of times words appear in the
title, document keywords and document
length. Duplicate sites are listed with
only one title, but all URLs are given.
You may request search results in URLs
only, brief description including title
and summary, full description including
title, summary, relevancy ranking and
URL in increments of 10, 25, 50, or
100. Descriptions are pulled from <META>
tags or top headings. A list of the
ten most-visited sites for your topic
is shown. These top ten hits from Direct
Hit are incorporated into the regular
search results if the output is set
to ten and there are results available
from Direct Hit. |
