New Technology at HotBot - Direct Hit

HotBot added a new service known as Direct Hit. Direct Hit is a company located in Wellesley, MA, whose software, Direct Hit provides highly relevant matches to search queries by measuring site popularity and user behavior after queries.

When you compose a query in HotBot and then visit a site that was returned in the top matches, the Direct Hit software takes note of which Web site you visited and even how long you stayed! After some number of people have executed the same search and visited different Web sites, Direct Hit builds a database of sites that people seemed to visit most frequently after that keyword query.

We have not yet interviewed Direct Hit and have no information on how long a Web site remains in their "popular list" or how hard it might be to unseat a Direct Hit-ranked site. Not all HotBot search engine queries return Direct Hit-ranked results in the top 10 spots - yet. It appears that Direct Hit requires a certain amount of data before they can return popularity ranked results.

If you are uncertain whether or not a keyword query returns Direct Hit-ranked matches, scroll to the bottom of the first page of the search results and look for this symbol: If you see it at the bottom of the page, this keyword query was answered using the Direct Hit database. This new technology makes a top ranking in HotBot even more crucial.

We would hazard a guess that no page can become popular by Direct Hit's standards if it isn't a top 10 to top 30 ranked page first. After all, we know that most people do not scroll down past the first 10 to 30 matches after they execute a search. Therefore, it is unlikely that even the best Web site located in position number 98 will ever attract enough visitors to be seen by Direct Hit's system.

Direct Hit is not a fad. This company's business plan was the winner of the 1998 MIT $50K Best New Technology Competition, and the company is funded by Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Mosaic Venture Partners. They're here to stay so, get used to this system. It could even be adopted by other search engines, so now is the time to start achieving top 10 rankings

From the Horses Mouth

We had the pleasure of interviewing a senior director at HotBot, and he was kind enough to volunteer a great deal of valuable information. He has asked us not to use his name and we will honor his wishes and simply share his insights.

HotBot has quickly become a serious contender and more and more important to Web site marketers. HotBot won an upset victory in the recent CNET search engine rankings. We use the phrase "upset" because who would have guessed that a search engine once considered a fringe engine would have beaten out AltaVista and Infoseek? HotBot's recent addition of 24 to 48 hour indexing, increasing their database size to 110 million documents, and terrific press coverage makes them a force on the Web.

HotBot is the search engine designed and run by those darlings of the Internet, Wired magazine. HotBot has many interesting features, but the most important, as far as you're concerned, is that it allows you to report low rankings!

Even better, if a site is ranked above your site that doesn't belong there, HotBot encourages you to report what it calls "obviously silly rankings" to feedback@ hotbot. com. Did someone stuff their keyword and description META tags with off-topic keywords just to get listed under a keyword that is very relevant to you? No worries, report them and they're gone!

Our contact told us of HotBot's target niche in the search engine market, namely to be a superior search tool by having the largest database and the largest amount of data indexed about each site. Specifically HotBot indexes all sorts of information about what's on your site and allows users to perform restricted searches by:

1· URL · media type
2· Pages that have acrobat · audio files
3· Shockwave · even an obscure file type
4· Searches within date ranges

Our contact at HotBot suggested that to achieve a high ranking, look to see if the keyword you are trying to optimize your page for appears in the page title, how frequently it appears in the document, and how close to the top of the document it appears.

We asked him to confirm the rumor that HotBot no longer considers keywords in the title tag for relevancy. He refuted this and offered that HotBot will consider keywords in the title tag, but if they are not included, it will not mean the site won't be returned for a keyword query. He also suggested that since HotBot allows you to search the Web by Web site title, you should be especially concerned about keyword placement in this tag.

He went on to inform us that HotBot is not header tag <H1> through <H6> sensitive, but HotBot weights keywords near the top of your page, and headers are often located there.