Hacker News Reader

I'd argue that HotBot is a lot more catchy since 1) it rhymes, 2) it's shorter in length.

AskJeeves would also be abbreviated in conversation to just "Jeeves", which is definitely as the original creators intended. "DuckDuckGo" doesn't have these features going for it.

Dogpile

Lycos.

Bing.

Excite.

AltaVista.

Veronica

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_(search_engine)

With the blink of an 'y', Hotbot was one letter away from something completely different. Although the term NSFW was yet to be invented back then.

One of my first exposures to "typo squatting" was when I accidentally typed in "hotbat" in the early 2000's. It led to some generic porn site with a girl in a tight tshirt holding a baseball bat as a splash image. No other real connection to the name as far as I could tell. Just a run of the mill (for the time) paid porn site.

In another universe, search is run by Hotboy.com, with its hotmale.com email system