ZapMeta Meta-Search Offers Nice Set of Web Features ResearchBuzz (Feb 25) - good advice on using this metasearch engine. It has 9 search engines - you can choose which to use - and it collates results. Has several features for viewing results and many filtering options for Advanced Search. Amazingly, it does seem to handle boolean - eg. "scenic drives" AND (quebec OR maine) - but always be careful - not all search engines can process a boolean query. It says it can handle NEAR too but only in simple queries, such as - darwin NEAR beagle. See the Search Tips page.
Also see Chris Sherman's review - ZapMeta: A Promising New Meta Search Engine SearchDay (Feb 26) -- "A new meta search engine offers speedy, relevant results, and some cool visualization features that actually make it easy to check out sponsored listings without leaving your result page. "
Sherman noted that this is the creation of a team of college students (college not named). One worry is that Zapmeta only has an agreement with Gigablast for running searches. Search engines are fussy about this and do block access.
Posted by Gwen at February 26, 2004 01:21 PM