Last month, I wrote about how HotBot had stolen all of my top ten hits at Inktomi. Well, there are no worries there anymore. Just last week, HotBot reinvented itself as some kind of search engine “take your pick”. It’s not meta search and it’s not hybrid… it’s “take your pick” (but I guess they have a really cool marketing term for it in-house

I’ve seen lots of comment from search engine marketers in forums and newsletters this week about the change. Most are favourable reports about the new advanced search options and the clean interface and the speed and the…

Is it just me? Is it? Am I the only one agreeing with all that’s said - but wondering what benefit these changes will make in terms of driving potential traffic.

OK, we’re search engine marketers or online marketers, whatever. We know what Inktomi is. We know what Fast is. We know what Teoma is. But I bet, out of the choices available, your average surfer has only ever heard of Google. And the fact that the average surfer may ever actually find himself at HotBot in the first place, may be a bit of a mission on the behalf of Terra Lycos anyway.

Seriously, if your average surfer finds himself with a choice of three search services he’s never really heard of, and one that he has: which one do you think he’s likely to choose? Well, if it happens to be one of the web’s most well known search engine brands…

This may be a way of introducing these new brands to the average surfer. And once he’s happy with the results from one of these new choices, what’s to stop him dumping HotBot and just using the AllTheWeb interface, or Teoma? It seems to be a pretty good way of inducing brand switching, but not to the immediate benefit of HotBot.

I’m sure that HotBot has pleased many in the search engine and online marketing community (even I like power searching over there now). But, you know, I don’t get much business at all from established online marketers and serious researchers. I get most of my business from online “newbies” who (according to my own stats) come from: Google, Yahoo! and MSN, in the main.

I doubt whether even these changes will make a darned bit of difference to the meagre traffic they were sending just the week before last.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to fanfare and applaud HotBot for at least doing something. I’m just trying to figure who their target group is. During the research for my search engine book, one of the things that came to the surface many times was that the average surfer doesn’t look for advanced search options, they rarely check buttons or boxes, they just stick two words in the search box: that’s it.

So asking them to choose… What’s an Inktomi? What’s a Teoma? There’s nothing obvious on the page to tell them why they have have these options and what they are in the first place. And as for “Custom Web Filters”… well I can only imagine the average surfer asking himself: “I didn’t have to set one of those up over at Google… did I?”

Having said all that, at least you can directly peek into the Inktomi database now if you want to check and see whether you’ve been indexed, compare linkage data etc.