Summary: Now part of the Terra Lycos Network, HotBot is an essential Search Engine to get your website listed in. HotBot obtains its results from three different sources: Direct Hit, Open Directory Project, and Inktomi.

How to get listed: To get listed go to HotBot's Submit Web Site form. (Be sure to have meta tags on your webpage before submitting!)

How to get a good listing: Since HotBot uses three different databases as listed above the first thing you should do is make sure you submit your site to all three databases Direct Hit, Open Directory Project, and Inktomi and read up on their respective sections within this webpage. In general, the most common results on the first page are from Direct Hit, the second results page are from Dmoz, and the rest are from Inktomi.

The amount of incoming links from other sites that HotBot recognize is important also. The more sites that are already listed in HotBot and have a link on their site pointing to your site the better your listing will become. So, with that said,if your site has a lot of sites that link to you but HotBot doesn't know those sites exist don't wait for the webmasters of those site to submit the site themselves, do it for them. The best and quickest way to do this would be to go to an automatic search engine submitter. A good auto submission program can be found at Jim Tools. This way HotBot will eventually see that many sites are listed to you and you'll also be providing a kind service for the site webmasters. Pat yourself on the back. =)

To get those top "Featured Listings" you'll have to have your site listed in GoTo.com and have one one of the top three paid listings for the relevant keywod(s).

Frequency of updates: The best way to measure the frequency of updates is by submitting your site to Inktomi via Position Tech. If you do this your site will be updated in the index on an average of every 2 days.

Name of bot: HotBot no longer has its own bot, if you use HotBot's Submit Web Site form Inktomi's bot "Slurp" will visit your website.