I got a referral from HotBot today. I'd be willing to wager money that a surprisingly large percentage of the people that work with me in an interactive department don't even know what HotBot is. Interestingly (and probably not surprisingly) they still have the same logo from the 90s.

I just went back and looked at my stats from the first full month of this site at this domain and my top referrer was Altavista, by a pretty wide margin. Hotbot was there a little too. As was Northern Light- I'd completely forgotten about them. No Google traffic at all. Compare that to today when Google provides the vast majority of my referrals and an Altavista referral is a novelty.

My first Google referrals didn't come until November of 1999 (kung fu movies – Google Search.) I had 8 google referrals for the entire month. I probably get 8 Google referrals every 10 minutes now.