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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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