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Meta search
is performed by meta search engines in a way that is different
than other search engines. Meta search engines perform their
searches upon the major and minor organic and non-organic
SE's and directories and combine the results into their
own directory.
The advantage
of doing a meta search is that the user is pulling information
from many different sources simultaneously, so there is
a natural cross-referencing that is occurring. When one
performs a meta search, you are not delving into the meta
search engine's database since it has none. You will be
delving into the databases of other SE's and directories.
Most meta search engines also do not collect websites and
have no means for you to add a url to their sites.
Many of the
meta search engines integrate the search results and delete
duplicate listings received from the different SE's databases.
Most of the meta search engines rank their results according
to various criteria and varying algorithms.
The meta search
engines are sometimes at odds with the other SE's and directories
such as Northern Light which will not let the meta search
engines delve into its databases because of the drain it
has on the Northern Light's resources.
Before a user
conducts a meta search it is important to find out what
search engines and directories are included in the meta
search. Some meta engines even allow you to choose which
resources to search. Many meta search engines will query
the major SE's such as AltaVista, Excite, Lycos, and Infoseek.
Some meta search engines will also do their queries on usenet
groups and specialized databases.
Meta search
engines generally do not do exhaustive queries like individual
SE's do. They return the top 10 or top 50 results from many
different resources and leave it at that. The question is
whether to use a meta search engine or a regular SE to find
what you are looking for? For some obscure terms, doing
a meta search may yield better results since many different
search engines are consulted. For regular searches, though,
Googling it may just do it for you.
Listed below
are a few of the top meta search engines on the Internet.
Dogpile allows
the user to search the web, yellow pages and white pages.
Dogpile gets its web search results from Google, Yahoo,
Ask Jeeves, About, Overture and Teoma and consolidates the
results into one list. Dogpile as can be used to search
for images, audio, multimedia, news and shopping sites.
Mamma has a
very clean interface similar to that of Google. Mamma was
created in 1996 as a master's thesis and was one of the
first meta search engines on the Internet. With Mamma you
can do a web search plus search for images, news, yellow
pages and white pages.
HotBot is one
of the Lycos group of sites and used to be one of the major
search engines on the Internet. With the rise of Google
and intense competition from other search engines and directories,
HotBot has fallen a bit from its hey-day. In the HotBot
interface, you can do a search from HotBot, Google or Ask
Jeeves. You can also save custom filters for you searches.
Vivisimo is
the Internet leader in a certain type of meta search which
is called document clustering (automatic categorization)
of results. The text is arranged into hierarchically sorted
category folders. Besides the main search results on the
right side of the screen you have the clustered results
on the left side.
WebCrawler searches
Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, About, LookSmart, FindWhat, Overture
and Teoma. WebCrawler was originally created as a desktop
application on January 24, 1994. It went live on the Internet
in April the same year and in November, WebCrawler handled
its one-millionth search. WebCrawler is now part of the
InfoSpace team.
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