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The Meta Search Engines: A Web Searcher's Best Friends by: Daniel Bazac I know what you're thinking: Google gives you such accurate results that you don't need any other search tool. Well, let's see about that. You might - or might not - know that no major search engine indexes ALL the existing Web pages. OpenFind states that it indexes 3.5 billion Web pages, Google claims 2.4 billion, AlltheWeb - 2.1 billion, Inktomi - a little more than 2 billion, WiseNut - 1.5 billion and AltaVista - 1 billion Web pages. The truth is, nobody knows how wide the Web is. Some say 5 billion pages, some 8 billion, some even more. Anyway, what's definite is that the major search engines (SEs) index only a fraction of the 'publicly indexable Web'. Moreover, every SE indexes different Web pages, which means if you use only one SE you will miss relevant results that can be found in other search engines. One way to more effectively search the Web is to use a meta search engine. What Is A Meta Search Engine? A meta search engine (also know as multi-threaded engine) is a search tool that sends your query simultaneously to several search engines (SEs), Web directories (WDs) and sometimes to the so-called Invisible (Deep) Web, a collection of online information not indexed by traditional search engines. After collecting the results, the meta search engine (MSE) will remove the duplicate links and, according to its algorithm, combine/rank the results into a single merged list. An important note: Unlike the individual search engines and directories, the meta search engines Do not have their own databases and Do not accept URL submissions. Pros and Cons of Meta Search Engines Pros: MSEs save searchers a considerable amount of time by sparing them the trouble of running a query in each search engine. The results - most of the time - are extremely relevant. MSEs can be used by Webmasters to find their site's presence, rankings and link popularity in the major SEs. Cons: Because some SEs or WDs do not support advanced searching techniques such as quotation marks to enclose phrases or Boolean operators, no (or irrelevant) results from those SEs will appear in the MSEs results list when those techniques are used. MSEs Come In Four Flavors: 'Real' MSEs which aggregate/rank the results in one page 'Pseudo' MSEs type I which exclusively group the results by search engine 'Pseudo' MSEs type II which open a separate browser window for each search engine used and Search Utilities, software search tools. The following provides detailed information on each of the four MSE types, along with my ranking: 1. 'Real' MSEs These real MSEs simultaneously search the major search engines, aggregate the results, eliminate the duplicates and return the most relevant matches, according to the engine's algorithm. Following is a list of a few meta search engines that you might find useful. It's by no means complete, but it might help you find what you need. (The criteria I used to determine the best MSEs were: the amount and the relevance of the results, the capability to handle advanced searches, the ability to enable users to customize searches, the speed of their searches and others.) ez2www [ http://ez2www.com ] Searches the best SEs - AlltheWeb, Google, AltaVista, Teoma, Wisenut - and directories - Yahoo! and Open Directory. Through its 'Advanced Search' function it also searches a small part of the Invisible (Deep) Web. It also searches news, newsgroups, MP'3
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