It is popular search engines that give results based upon what information other searchers have chosen during their previous search for the same terms. It measures what people are clicking at major search services across the globe in the internet. Multiple search terms are matched against previous searches. It also measures the length of time, people spend on these sites.

Direct Hit was launched in 1998 and was unique from other search engines of the time due to its automated search technology that ranked sites by tracking the products, services and information that users were searching for, the total time they spent at different websites visited from search results.

Advantages of DH:
# It has its own database.
# A web researcher can see what searches other people have done particularly on popular topics.
# By using ‘click through’ and ‘visit duration’ data, a person can know what the most popular sites for various search topics are.
# DH uses click popularity, a feature that allows users, rather than search engines or directory editors, to organize search results. Click popularity is a measure of the number of clicks received by each site in a search engine's results page.
# It also uses a special feature called stickiness that measures the amount of time a user spends at a site. It's calculated based on the time that is spent between each of the user's clicks on the search engine's results page.

Drawbacks of this search engine:
# The draw back of this search engine is that it is not possible to perform searches on specific topics, find new sites or look for information in less popular size.
# Further its data base is very small as compared to similar search engines.
# Direct Hit only matches terms against previous inquiries, not the records, and so most of the features like Boolean searching, Proximity searching, Truncation, Case sensitivity, Field searching etc, are not used directly.
# Sites are sorted by this search engine, based on their popularity among previous searchers which is measured by the hits people click on.
# It displays only 10 records.
# The results initially showed promise, but the technology is not well maintained and improved.

Direct Hit is a stand alone web site. It is currently used by Lycos, Hotbot, MSN, and other search engines. It is currently owned and incorporated into Ask Jeeves and Teoma.