March 22, 2004

HotBot, best known as an Internet search engine, has upgraded its toolbar so that it can find files on your computer's hard drive.

And not just any files. Microsoft Word documents, e-mail messages, pdf files, even old Web pages that you visited can be tracked down with the new DeskTop toolbar.

When most people want to find something on the Web, they go straight to the Google or Yahoo Web pages and type in their search terms.

But search toolbars are now letting people bypass those Web sites completely. The toolbars are tiny applications you download to your desktop. They allow you to complete a search straight from a browser, regardless of what Web page you're on.

HotBot (www.hotbot.com)
Have you ever searched for a file or document on your computer and anguished over the long listing of irrelevant files that you got back?

Help is on the way, and from an unlikely source. HotBot, best known as an Internet search engine, has upgraded its toolbar so that it can find files on your computer's hard drive. And not just any files. Microsoft Word documents, e-mail messages, pdf files, even old Web pages that you visited can be tracked down with the new DeskTop toolbar.

The search results appear in a side pane within your browser. ``People have gotten used to living within the browser, so we decided this should happen from within the browser,'' said Tom Wilde, general manager of search services for Lycos, which operates HotBot.

To do its job, the toolbar needs to index your files, scanning them so it can quickly find what you're looking for later. You can start this process manually or set the preferences so that it happens automatically at set intervals.

Of course, the toolbar is still a quick way to do Web searches. The toolbar can also block pop-up ads. And the company has added a news reader, or aggregator, that can fetch RSS feeds from other Web sites. That allows users to subscribe to headlines and story summaries from news Web sites and blogs.

Unlike some toolbars, the HotBot bar does not collect information about your Web searching habits and send it back to the search company for advertising purposes. Wilde says all the personal information stays on your computer.

He said that in the future, the toolbar will also be able to search Web-based e-mail accounts such as Yahoo Mail or Hotmail. Starting today, the free toolbar can be downloaded from www.hotbot.com. We found the installation quick and painless. But note that it only works with the Internet Explorer 6.0 browser and Windows 98 or higher.

Wilde says the HotBot toolbar is aimed mostly at power users. But the move toward desktop searching will likely be the first of many. This is one of the hot new areas in the search field, and Microsoft and others are jumping in with both feet.

Dogpile (www.dogpile.com)
Next we have the new Dogpile toolbar. Dogpile is a metasearch engine, meaning it pulls results from a combination of search engines, including Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, About, Teoma, FindWhat, LookSmart and others.

As with HotBot, Dogpile's new toolbar (due to be released this week), will let users subscribe to news feeds from Web sites. They'll be able to choose from a list of pre-loaded feeds from sites such as ABCNews.com or easily add their own.

Dogpile's goal is to demystify the concept of RSS (and Atom) news feeds, making it easy enough for anyone to quickly start using the emerging technology.

Dogpile has also added a funky option: the ability to watch search terms that other Dogpile users have used scroll across the toolbar, ticker-style. Company officials call it ``search voyeurism.''

You'll be able to download the toolbar from Dogpile.com this week, and Metacrawler.com and Webcrawler.com in May. You'll also find customized versions of it at Web sites run by the company's partners, such as FoxNews or ABC News.

Source: Mercury News

        

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