The new wotbot search engine

(August 3 2003, updated August 8) There is a new search engine in town. The child's name is wotbot and the search engine is currently in alpha testing mode.

There is a UK and a US version of the site, both with a simplistic and easy to use interface.

At the moment the database contains some 6 million pages. However, the British wotbot team hopes to reach 100 million by the end of the year. They state that their aim is to become a leader in the field, with a "new and innovative suite of experimental features".

At the moment these features include rather decent advanced search options (based on pull down menus), the use of some Boolean operators (-, or and "phrases") and wild cards (? for one letter and * for multiple characters). Default search is Boolean AND.

There is a preference page that lets you modify the result pages, and a "related searches" function that adds more focused queries in the right hand column of result pages.

Each listing is marked with a flag signifying the country of origin. The engine determines national identity on the basis of the domain suffix. Howver, Mike Nott of wotBot tells us that if the site has a generic suffix e.g. a .com, .net or .org etc, then they trace the location of where the site is hosted. This is why the Norwegian Pandia a is given an American flag: It is hosted in the US.

Each listing is marked with a flag signifying the country of origin. The engine determines national In the future they plan to have a webmaster modification section that enables sites to specify a different country flag if they so wish.

There is also a preview function that opens up a small frame in the result page containing the relevant Web page.

The wotbot team launched the very first version of this search engine in October last year.

See help file for more information.

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