Meta-Search Engines
The meta-search engine will submit
your search terms to several search services at one time and return the top
hits to you from each. Most meta-search engines will collate results, re-weight
them according to their rankings at each source engine, eliminate duplicates,
and cluster them according to a topic. These services can quickly scan the Web
for you or perform a meta search of video sources, blogs and other collections.
Advantages:
- You save time.
- Meta-search engines that group results by topic are superb tools for quickly
helping you narrow your focus and see the possible angles. Some provide additional
visual aids (Allplus and Carrot2).
- You can often judge from a metasearch which search services are most likely
to have more or better content. Some metasearchers will show samplings from
other content types (blogs, video etc) along with web - reminding you that
these might also hold the answer.
- The metaseach will give you a quicker view of the high ranking results at
the engines.
- You are sure to pick up some new hits from search engines you haven't look
at.
Disadvantages
- Most meta-search engines are limited to simple words or phrases. The advanced
features and instructions of each search engine are available only by going
to the individual search-engine site.
- Results tend to be limited to 10 to 50 hits from each search engine. The
meta-searchers give the impression of being comprehensive but rarely are.
- Many search the lesser engines and usually pick up pay-for-placement search
engines like Kanoodle.
- Search engines used by the metasearcher may duplicate each other. You might
see Alltheweb, Altavista and Yahoo, all of which use the same Yahoo database.
The names might also be out of date; eg., Ask Jeeves is now Ask, and MSN is
Bing; or the search engine is dead - as is the case with Teoma and Wisenut.
Where to Next?
Run some searches at these meta-search engines.
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