#HotBot

[never-obsolete]

hotbot.com - November 1999

[skullharvester]

More old art: One of my two Ratchet & Clank OCs: double agent Rita with her hairdryer lookin' blaster.

'Tis a silly idea for a character, but I love her, anyway. It's hard not to be nostalgic for old OCs.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

STARTUPS AND IDEAS

And if you set off the same alarms in your head that it does in mine. We charged a flat fee of $300/month for big stores, so it is unfair to delay. I found that I got over 100 other responses listing the surprises they encountered. The first stories about Jaynes cited this source, but now it's simply repeated as if it were hard to reproduce in other countries too. They just wanted to fix a problem they encountered in their research. There are two things that take attention: convincing investors, and negotiating with them. When your company is only a few percent of the world's population will be exceptional in some field only if there are still some countries that are not copyright colonies of the US, they'll want to come here. And some that don't still manage to have the government invest in the nerds? Wearing suits, we're told, will make us 3. It's like telling the truth.

A rounds. Between the volume of people we judge and the rapid, unequivocal test that's applied to our choices, Y Combinator exerts less. One way to answer that is to ask yourself at what point you'd bet against it. People look at Reddit and think I wish I could say it was this way for every startup they fund. You now have to get good grades or want to be a good language. Most of them myself included are more comfortable dealing with abstract ideas than with people. They think they're going to raise $200,000. This essay is derived from a talk at the 2009 Startup School. Custom work doesn't scale. You want the deal to close, so you have to resign yourself to everything taking longer than it should.

So you'd only want to talk to you about a series A in phase 2 sometimes tack on a few investors after leaving fundraising mode. I often spent money I desperately needed on stuff that I didn't want to start your own company, which costs a couple thousand left. We have the potential to ensure that the US remains a technology superpower just by letting in a few months later saying This is supposed to be. I was walking down the street on trash night beware of anything you find yourself describing as perfectly good, or I'd see something as I was walking down the street on trash night beware of anything you find yourself describing as perfectly good, or I'd find something in almost new condition for a tenth its retail price and what I paid for it. They just looked like they were compared to the VCs who funded them. That scenario may seem unlikely now, but it feels young because it's full of rich people, it has few nerds. Then if they decide they do want to invest—usually because they've heard you're a hot prospect, because it takes most of the difficulty of fundraising, that should be resisted.

The name is more excusable if one considers it as meaning that we enable people to escape cubicles. And if we, who were 29 and 30 at the time seemed a lot of companies do. The Men's Wearhouse. Essentially, they lead you on. We should have expected this. Why are founders surprised that VCs are clueless? Founders are often competitive people, and what progress you've made so far.

But it often comes as a surprise to startups how much harder it is to change directions. So look for simple things that other people have overlooked—things people will later claim were obvious—especially when they've been led astray by obsolete conventions, or by redesigning the product in the way we do. Do the extra work of getting personal introductions. I'm convinced, is just the seed. Most people in America do. If you work on overlooked problems, you're more likely to notice startups nearby. It would be great if schools taught students how to choose problems as well as a duck, it's hard to change something so simple as a name, imagine how hard it is to judge startup ideas, particularly their own. Meaning that unpleasant work pays.

Either businesses aren't supposed to be. And aside from that, grad school is professional training in research, and you have to seem confident, and you just have to do an angel round before going to VCs. Dressing down loses appeal as men suit up at the office writes Tenisha Mercer of The Detroit News. But I took so many CS classes that most CS majors thought I was one. And since good people like good colleagues, that means the best programmers could collect in just a few hubs. Don't get addicted to fundraising. And that sort of thing you'd expect Google to do. Viaweb wasn't the first startup Robert Morris and I started. If you work patiently it's less stressful, and you just create Carnegie-Mellon. It makes me spend more time on the demo or the business plan, addressing the five fundamental questions: what they're going to do this.

With the help of some part-time jobs they made it last 18 months. They make the experience of buying stuff so pleasant that shopping becomes a leisure activity. 7 that matter: Yahoo, AltaVista, Excite, WebCrawler, InfoSeek, Lycos, and HotBot. I. Will you be able to come up with surprising new ideas. Rapid growth is what makes a company a startup. I wanted to keep people from getting spammed.

Their investors agree. He knows what happened in every deal in the Valley, half the time what they are talking about and are years behind in their thinking. It's obvious why transparency has that effect. Same story in 2004. Bill Gates started either. Perhaps it was even better than we'd hoped. If you're benevolent, people will rally around you: investors, customers, other companies, and potential employees. When we started Artix, I see signs of all three. Most of them had never seen the Web before we came to tell them why they should be planning to raise a lot more intimidating to start a company by just writing some clever software, putting it on a server somewhere, and watching the money roll in—without ever having to talk to his girlfriend in Taiwan, and to save long-distance bills he wrote some software that would convert sound to data packets that could be sent over the Internet. When del. I have thought about a lot. If you turned it over, it said Inside Macintosh.

Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, and Aaron Swartz for putting up with me.

[infiniteglitterfall]

Yeah, they do, but are there any that don't suck?

Bing sucks. DuckDuckGo uses Bing, which sucks. Yahoo might be kinda okay?

DogPile VISIBLY sucks, as in it's advertising Amazon, Walmart, and Lowe's to me before I even type anything.

Yandex looks okay for now, but was basically just sold to the Kremlin.

Presearch can't stop advertising to me either. It's full of babble about decentralized blockchain search, and ads for everything from Walmart to Pulsechain. I hate it.

Brave sounds good, but looks identical to Google, specifically down to the weird AI-generated summaries at the top.

Ask.com is terrible. HotBot became the same thing Ask does. AltaVista became Yahoo.

Now I'm into this. Let's Google obscure search engines.

Kagi actually looks better than Google.

It tells you ahead of time when a site is paywalled, gives you more details of each result, and provided some results I hadn't seen on other search engines.

It also costs money - but you get the first 100 searches for free, and they practically say that you can keep giving them burner emails forever. And it's supposed to do well with search results that aren't in English, which only Google is good at otherwise.

Looks like the paid versions are $5/mo for 300 searches, or $10/mo for unlimited. And to be fair to Kagi, lots of apps are charging me $5/mo for stuff I don't always even use.

Hey all, you know how internet searches suck now? When the results are awful, full-of-AI, death-of-the-internet levels of bad?

Start appending date constraints to your searches - "before:2023".

My results have gone from 90% AI bullshit to ~60% usable - which frankly at this point is a huge improvement.

[tsunflowers]

my mother said she had a patron at the library who was still using hotmail in 2025 so I told her about hogmail.clom and she said in the early days of the internet she was teaching a class at the library trying to get people to use a web crawler called hotbot and a guy typed in hotbod and found porno

[demonsdealings]

brain called Vox a hotbot, and now I’m done with myself. hello. I am alive and I miss u all.

[bitletsanddrabbles]

So the "that's a cover" thread reminded me of something sort of related. I grew up in the era where music was normally heard on the radio, unless someone had a cassette or LP of something, and they only told you the artists and titles of the songs you'd heard at the end of the set. Sometimes the beginning. Occasionally you'd hear songs other places - in stores, in school events, etc. - but there you didn't hear the name or artist at all. In short, you could very easily know a song by heart without knowing what it was called or who performed it. As example, when I was in high school there was a very popular song that could easily have been known as "You know, the one that goes 'Somebody told me that you had a boyfriend...'" The internet was only just becoming a Thing then, so the concept of "Googling the lyrics" wasn't a thing yet, and not just because Google was years away from being invented.

Time went on. I went through uni, graduated, got a job with a commute, and started listening to the radio instead of 'whatever music my friends introduced me to' again. It was then I learned that the one station that played almost exclusively things I liked didn't tell you the titles and artists at all, they made you go to their website to find out who you were listening to! My friend, I did not have time for that. I had a full time job, I had to make my own meals, etc. I did not have time to go to a website and try to remember in which hour I had heard the song with the lyrics "Somebody told me" so I could figure it out.

Of course, by this time Google was starting to be a thing, but "just Google the lyrics" wasn't instinct yet. We were still in HotBot mode and HotBot...went away for a reason.

One day I was walking down the street and I found a CD laying on the sidewalk in a busted up case. I picked it up and looked at it. Band name? The Killers. Unfamiliar. The title? Hot Fuss. Hmm. Not auspicious. Didn't sound like the sort of thing I normally listened to, but hey! Free CD. I took it with me figuring I'd a) see if it played and b) if it was worth keeping and if it was trash I'd turn it into a coaster. When I got home I wasn't in the mood to listen to new music, forget potential trash new music, so I set it aside.

It got slowly buried.

I forgot it existed.

The real estate bubble burst and I had to move out of my condo and into a house I hastily went in with Mum on. It got packed without anyone doing more than registering the fact it was a CD.

In the meantime, I wound up with a pest control operative's license. This had been encouraged so that I could talk more competently to customers on the phone, but it quickly because obvious the real reason it was so that I could ride around with unliscensed techs and make sure they didn't do anything illegal while we waited for them to be able to take their state test. Most of them were pretty competent, pleasant individuals, so it was mostly just kind of annoying because the managers could be kinda dicks about it. One of the guys was a huge, huge, huge music buff and we had similar taste, so we road around singing along with old favorites and he introduced me to some new stuff. He loved Mumford and Sons, so I learned their name. There was also another song that played that a lot on his station that was pretty obviously titled "Mr. Brightside". I mean, nothing else you'd call that song. At first I wasn't sure about it. I kinda liked it, I kinda didn't. It grew on me though.

By now, Google was firmly more than just an email service. The years when you needed an invitation to get a GMail account were gone and Google was starting to be the search engine of choice. YouTube had come on the scene. When I wanted to listen to "Mr. Brightside" at home, all I had to do was go to YouTube, look it up, and I could not only listen to it, but also learn that it was done by a band called The Killers. I also, courtesy of the side bar, discovered that they had done that song with the lyrics that went "Somebody told me" (and hey! Guess the song title! ...yeah, that wasn't hard...) and discovered and utterly fell in love with "Smile Like You Mean It". Since .mp3s were now something you could purchase, I bought them all.

One day I stepped on the floor of my office and it gave under my weight. Shit. Say what you like about renting, but unless your landlord is a slumlord, having someone else to pay the bills is nice. Just in time for Christmas we got to have my office refloored and, oh hey, several other things were no longer up to code, so that needed doing too. My whole life was basically shoved into the second bedroom. I was not pleased.

There was still a lot of clutter from the move in there, though, since someone else will finish unpacking for me after I've died of old age, so I took the time to sift through some of it. In the process, I found that CD I'd found on the sidewalk years ago. I immediately recognized it as 'that CD I found on the sidewalk years ago' and tried to remember the title and artist. Couldn't, except that it hadn't sounded promising. Needless to say I picked it up to have a look.

Yes, it still plays.

(It's actually probably a good thing I hadn't listened to it when I found it since "Jenny Was A Friend Of Mine" took a couple listens to catch on, so I probably wound have junked it...)

[bitletsanddrabbles]

writing historical fiction for another country will make you lose your mind because when you google "how much did a towel cost in England in 1885?" google will tell you the cost of towels in America because that's where you live and why would you want to know about England?

writing historical fiction will make you google things like “when we’re towels invented?” “how much did a towel cost in American in 1885?” “historical average number of towels owned per household”

[rishhhh]

The term Digital Marketing was first used in the 1990s. The digital age took off with the coming of the internet and the development of the Web 1.0 platform. The Web 1.0 platform allowed users to find the information they wanted but did not allow them to share this information over the web. Up until then, marketers worldwide were still unsure of the digital platform. They were not sure if their strategies would work since the internet had not yet seen widespread deployment.

In 1993, the first clickable banner went live, after which HotWired purchased a few banner ads for their advertising. This marked the beginning of the transition to the digital era of marketing. Because of this gradual shift, the year 1994 saw new technologies enter the digital marketplace. The very same year, Yahoo was launched.

Also known as "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" after its founder Jerry Yang, Yahoo received close to 1 million hits within the first year. This prompted wholesale changes in the digital marketing space, with companies optimizing their websites to pull in higher search engine rankings. 1996 saw the launch of a couple of more search engines and tools like HotBot, LookSmart, and Alexa.

[inkmimicry]

Uh oh, looks like I'll be cranking these out. I've embraced this blog as a bit of an archive for my ideas as well as an rp blog, as I tend to forget what a lot of details as years go by.

Some character end up on these charts purely as design/visual inspiration, but I did try to look at some personality ones here. Gol's alternate self was heavily inspired by Lenne from Final Fantasy X2, in career and tragic backstory, and fashion.

Gol, as a 'typical' female robot in Ratchet and Clank, had some design tips taken from the hotbots, and other humanoid robots who had yellow, anime-esq pupil-less eyes.

Jessica Rabbit gave alternate!Gol her alto voice, tall lady powers, and rare smiles. She embodies Motoko Kusanagi's vibe more than the original Gol, too. (Though she doesn't completely match Jessica's character, her voice matches better with Janet Van Dorn (by Stephanie Zimbalist).

It took a while for me to pin where I got Gol's specific vibe from - TWAU's Faith. Spunky, sarcastic, with a mellow voice, but a certain sadness overlaying every emotion she shows. I think it's a close voice-claim, too. Mulan is in there for her wit and 'oh I fucked up' attitude. Whenever I imagine Gol grinning cheesily, I imagine Mulan.

[atsvensson]

Qwant och Ecosia istället för Google

Google är ett av de stora US-amerikanska IT-företagen och dominerrar helt sökningarna på Internet. Bing som ägs av Microsoft är näst störst. Men det finns en mängd andra sökmotorer. De flesta av dem använder dock Google eller Bings sökfunktioner och index i bakgrunden. Det gäller exempelvis Ask.com (Google), DuckDuckGo (Google och Bing med flera), Ecosia (Google och Bing), HotBot (Bing), Lycos…

[theboysfromaustin]

In the 90s, we had an unlimited number of janky search engines - Google, Yahoo, AltaVista, Lycos, AskJeeves, WebCrawler and HotBot off the top of my head, and they all worked to a certain extent, but you were getting porn mixed in there, along with some other sketchy sites. You want to find stuff about Lassie? Well, then! Helen Slater was in the 1994 movie so here's her photoshopped with her knockers out.

But it was still preferable to what Google is now.

[digital-marketing-evolution]

In a world where over 170 million people use social media regularly, every working professional is expected to be familiar with at least the core tenets of Digital Marketing. In simple terms, Digital Marketing is promoting products over the Internet or any form of electronic media. The Digital Marketing Institute states, "Digital Marketing is the use of digital channels to promote or market products and services to targeted consumers and businesses."

People are consuming digital content daily. Very soon, traditional marketing platforms will disappear, and the digital market will completely take over. There are several advantages to Digital Marketing. Unlike traditional marketing, digital marketing is more affordable.

You can reach a larger audience in a shorter period. Technological advances have resulted in considerable attrition of the customer base of traditional marketing agencies and departments. People have moved on to tablets, phones, and computers, which are the areas where digital marketers have gained the most ground.

Master SEO, social media, pay-per-click, conversion optimization, digital analytics, content, mobile, & email marketing in just 12 months. Enroll for our https://www.webtrainings.in/

What Is Digital Marketing?

Any digital channels by a business or company to market or promote products and services to consumers are referred to as digital marketing. Different websites, mobile devices, social media, search engines, and similar channels are used in digital marketing.

How Successful is Digital Marketing?

With the advent of digitalization, it has been observed that the shopping crowd in the markets gradually decreased, and now it is seen that more and more people shop online for themselves and their families. So, there are numerous advantages to promoting your business online because you want to reach the right audience, and your audience is online.

Benefits of Digital Marketing

You can reach a larger audience in a shorter period. Technological advances have resulted in considerable attrition of the customer base of traditional marketing agencies and departments. People have moved on to tablets, phones, and computers, which are the areas where digital marketers have gained the most ground.

History of Digital Marketing 

The term Digital Marketing was first used in the 1990s. The digital age took off with the coming of the internet and the development of the Web 1.0 platform. The Web 1.0 platform allowed users to find the information they wanted but did not allow them to share this information over the web. Up until then, marketers worldwide were still unsure of the digital platform. They were not sure if their strategies would work since the internet had not yet seen widespread deployment.

In 1993, the first clickable banner went live, after which HotWired purchased a few banner ads for their advertising. This marked the beginning of the transition to the digital era of marketing. Because of this gradual shift, the year 1994 saw new technologies enter the digital marketplace. The very same year, Yahoo was launched.

Also known as "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" after its founder Jerry Yang, Yahoo received close to 1 million hits within the first year. This prompted wholesale changes in the digital marketing space, with companies optimizing their websites to pull in higher search engine rankings. 1996 saw the launch of a couple of more search engines and tools like HotBot, LookSmart, and Alexa.

1998 saw the birth of Google. Microsoft launched the MSN search engine and Yahoo brought to the market Yahoo web search. Two years later, the internet bubble burst, and all the smaller search engines were either left behind or wiped out leaving more space for the giants in the business. The digital marketing world saw its first steep surge in 2006 when search engine traffic was reported to have grown to about 6.4 billion in a single month. Not one to get left behind, Microsoft put MSN on the back burner and launched Live Search to compete with Google and Yahoo.

Then came Web 2.0, where people became more active participants rather than remain passive users. Web 2.0 allows users to interact with other users and businesses. Labels like ‘super information highway’ began to be applied to the internet. As a result, information flow volumes –including channels utilized by digital marketers- increased manifold, and by 2004, internet advertising and marketing in the US alone brought in around $2.9 billion.

Soon, social networking sites began to emerge. MySpace was the first social networking site to arrive, soon followed by Facebook. Many companies realized all these fresh new sites that were popping up were beginning to open new doors of opportunities to market their products and brands. It opened fresh avenues for business and signaled the beginning of a new chapter of business. With new resources, they needed new approaches to promote their brands & capitalize on the social networking platform.

The cookie was another important milestone in the digital marketing industry. Advertisers had begun to look for other ways to capitalize on the fledgling technology. One such technique was to track common browsing habits and usage patterns of frequent users of the internet to tailor promotions and marketing collateral to their tastes. The first cookie was designed to record user habits. The use of cookies has changed over the years, and cookies today are coded to offer marketers a variety of ways to collect literal user data. Products marketed digitally are now available to customers at all times. Statistics collected by the Marketingtechblog for 2014 show that posting on social media is the top online activity in the US. The average American spends 37 minutes a day on social media. 99% of digital marketers use Facebook to market, 97% use Twitter, 69% use Pinterest and 59% use Instagram. 70% of B2C marketers have acquired customers through Facebook. 67% of Twitter users are far more likely to buy from brands that they follow on Twitter. 83.8% of luxury brands have a presence on Pinterest. The top three social networking sites marketers use are LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

[sighinastorm]

I miss HotBot.

"A funny thing happened on the way to the enshittocene: Google – which astonished the world when it reinvented search, blowing Altavista and Yahoo out of the water with a search tool that seemed magic – suddenly turned into a pile of shit.

Google's search results are terrible. The top of the page is dominated by spam, scams, and ads. A surprising number of those ads are scams. Sometimes, these are high-stakes scams played out by well-resourced adversaries who stand to make a fortune by tricking Google[...]

Google operates one of the world's most consequential security system – The Algorithm (TM) – in total secrecy. We're not allowed to know how Google's ranking system works, what its criteria are, or even when it changes: "If we told you that, the spammers would win."

Well, they kept it a secret, and the spammers won anyway.

...

Some of the biggest, most powerful, most trusted publications in the world have a side-hustle in quietly producing SEO-friendly "10 Best ___________ of 2024" lists: Rolling Stone, Forbes, US News and Report, CNN, New York Magazine, CNN, CNET, Tom's Guide, and more.

Google literally has one job: to detect this kind of thing and crush it. The deal we made with Google was, "You monopolize search and use your monopoly rents to ensure that we never, ever try another search engine. In return, you will somehow distinguish between low-effort, useless nonsense and good information. You promised us that if you got to be the unelected, permanent overlord of all information access, you would 'organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.'"

They broke the deal." -Cory Doctorow

Read the whole article: https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

[void019]

See HotBot gets it

[toollistai]

What is Hotbot?

Your Go-To AI Assistant for Instant Answers

Why choose HotBot?

It’s not just about accessing information—it’s about doing it effortlessly and efficiently. With HotBot, you gain access to powerful AI that’s designed to be intuitive and accessible to everyone. Ask any question, get the best answers, and experience the convenience of modern AI technology with HotBot.

AI made simple, with HotBot.com.