recently, i made a very painful and personal decision to never go to hotbot again (or in boston, ‘neh-vah’)…lamentably, i believe that it’s time to move this tool from assisted living to a full time nursing home, along with lycos if possible… in the famous mental-reference-handbook “on death and dying” by elisabeth kubler ross (who is like the aretha franklin of thanatology), we living folk were introduced to the concept of ’stages of dying’ (aka ’stages of grief’)….the truncated cocktail party version of this: there are five stages that a dying person goes through when they are told that they have a terminal illness…stages go in progression through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

what’s this got to do with hotbot? lemme quickly walk you through this scenario: hotbot was cool once, a long time ago, like in 1996 when it was launched by wired (wired digital)…in ‘98, lycos gobbled it up (Denial: “yeah, so what? lycos is great! and so we’re still great, even with hotbot dammit!”)…then that drove lycos’ top technical mind in search out the front door (Anger: “i’m outta here!” - dr. john mauldin, inventor of the original lycos search in 1994 while at cmu)…skip to 2000, and lycos is being gobbled up by spanish terra networks at the height of the boom (Bargaining: “i’ll only put terra in the name if you lick my shoe” - bob davis, then running lycos)…then a year later, lycos is all over their “FAST” search and technology investment from earlier…by 2001, fast is all that’s powering lycos…plus those stupid dog ads (Depression: “shit, we can’t do anything right, let’s try FAST instead..plus bigger ads!”)…so time goes by, stock keeps slipping, revenue keeps on fallin’ and fallin’ until at last you’ve got crap like this: “lycos posts first positive EBITDA in its life history in late 2003″ (Acceptance: “oh, yeah, you’re right, we are old news! bob got out just in time, ’cause we’re basically dead.”)…

and what happened to hotbot along the way? well, for starters, it’s about halfway down the page at terra’s corporate site, above a few sites nobody gives a real rat’s ass about (remember tripod? ever heard of rumbo? yeah, i haven’t either)…and functionally? it’s just a shortcut to google (duh) and ask jeeves (aka, “ass jeeves”)…oh, and an option to still search on hotbot, which is powered by inktomi , now a yahoo! company, and really just part of the yahoo! overture umbrella i suppose…and overture, in case you didn’t know this, was originally goto.com, a bill gross idealab company, and we already know that bill gross (who investors tried to fire ) is the kiss of death …just not even worth the effort to bookmark it…bye-bye hotbot.

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