Metasearch

Metasearch resources such as www.metacrawler.com, www.ixquick.com and www.dogpile.com present a user's query to a number of search engines simultaneously and provide the user with the compiled results. Metacrawler at this time searches Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, About, LookSmart, Overture and FindWhat to provide its results, and lists which searched tool has web pages containing the sought word or phrase.

The weakness of metasearch is that since each search engine has unique commands not used by the metasearch tool, the search results cannot be winnowed as much as if each unique search engine itself was queried.   However, they allow the searcher to quickly see which search tools have significant occurances of a word or phrase.   Therefore, use metasearch tools after using directories, or after a couple of search engine searchs have been unsatisfactory.


- DD