Hard to find REAL listings at HotBot these days

[Advisor]

Man, oh man...

I was just checking to see if client's site was doing okay in HotBot and boy is it hard to even find regular listings at HotBot. You have to wade through miles of their paid listings, which of course are masquerading as real listing. How sad. No wonder nobody uses HotBot any more for their searches. Why don't they just do what GO does and make all the results from GoTo. At least that way they wouldn't be trying to pass themselves off as an actual search engine with relevant results.

It's sooooo easy to see why Google rules and always will (unless they start taking GoTo listings also!).

Disgusted Jill :rolleyes:

[ihelpyou]

Agreed. I do not bother with Hotbot anymore. Simply not worth the hassle of all the paid listings.

[markymark]

I agree that there's lots of rubbish in HotBot these days and it does mess with the relevancy of the search engine. As for nobody using it, I thought that was true as well until this last week. I've been optimising a site for a rock band and they've been getting a lot of hits through HotBot for searches where the searcher has ticked the 'page must include mp3' box.

I think this is because the tick box is conveniently placed on the home page rather than in an advanced search option, but this has come as a big surprise to me.

[Navarone]

Hello

I was just looking through some of my se reports and noticed that hotbot isn't returning any results on a consistant basis. So I thought I check out the forum here and see there is anything going on that I should know about. After reading some of the threads, I would ask, how can you tell a paid listing from a normal listing.

Navarone

[Advisor]

how can you tell a paid listing from a normal listing. And therein lies the problem for the average surfer!

The sites at the top in the "Products and Services" section are ads. Of course, there would be no way for the average surfer to know this. Also, the "Featured Listings" at the bottom are also ads.

If you look at the URLs for those links (hover your mouse over them) you'll see that they have "Overture" in them...a dead giveaway that they're PPC listings.

GRRRRR...it's really frustrating how they do anything they can to make those results appear to be "real."

Jill

[JuniorHarris]

Nothing better then Goto listings in sheep's clothing!~ Oh you can call it overture if you want, I still call it crap!~ Rubles do not equal relevancy...and disguising them does not either. Some engines may be able to get by with this deception for now, but it will catch up with them.