The search engine launched by Wired’s HotWired division in 1996 was HotBot. It debuted in May 1996 and used search results supplied by the Inktomi database, making it one of the prominent competitors in the rapidly expanding web-search market.
HotBot was co-developed with Inktomi, a young company staffed by University of California, Berkeley students. Its launch emphasized frequent crawling and a large index: HotBot claimed it could index the web weekly and promoted itself as having one of the most complete web indexes available. Its colorful interface and phrase-search features helped it attract attention.
The service was not the same thing as LookSmart, Lycos, or InfoSeek. LookSmart supplied directory results to HotBot for a period, while Lycos later acquired HotBot when it bought Wired in October 1998. HotBot continued to operate separately alongside Lycos’s own search engine.
HotBot’s later history was complicated. It eventually became a multi-engine search interface, offering access to databases such as Google, Inktomi, FAST, and Teoma. The original search brand declined after its 1990s peak, and the Hotbot.com domain was sold in 2016.