What Is A Meta Search Engine

In a meta-search engine, you submit keywords in its search box, and it transmits your search simultaneously to several individual search engines and their databases of web pages. Within a few seconds, you get back results from all the search engines queried. Meta-search engines do not own a database of Web pages; they send your search terms to the databases maintained by search engine companies.

The idea of meta-searching is much better than the reality in most cases. You would think you would save a lot of time by searching only in one place and sparing the need to use and learn several separate search engines. It depends a lot on what they search and how they organize the results. They cannot be better than the databases they query.

This page used to include a number of meta-searchers that do no more than what the preceding paragraph describes. Advances in technology have caused two types of meta-search engines to rise far above the others, and I no longer list anything but a selection of these "smarter" search engines.

There are two families of smarter meta-search engines at this time:

·         Meta-searchers that search good databases, accept complex searches, integrate results well, eliminate duplicates, and offer additional features such as clustering by subjects within your search results.

·         Tools for serious digging in many resources, with powerful abilities to help you find what you seek within search results. These are appropriate for very serious researchers to use for in depth probing of a topic.

So there is all of this hype associated with metasearch engines - sites that will take your keywords, send them to a large number of search engines at once and return the results to you. What's the big deal? Well, they are supposed to make it more convenient - the justification is "why search for something at several sites one after the other, when a computer can combine the results for you?". Personally, I can think of a couple reasons why I'd rather do it myself...

First off, a metasearch engine can only take inputs from you that are supported by all search engines that it uses. So, the lowest-common-demoninator of those sites' features will determine what you can enter. Also, you are now trusting the meta-search engine to interact with those search engines properly.

Secondly, what is the point of convenience? The real convenience is finding the best result quickly, not getting the largest number of bad results. You, as a human being, will be much more intelligent in how you search for something. Don't trust a meta-search engine which gives you the results of several sites in the order that they return results. You should go to the most likely search engine for your topic. If that doesn't show anything, you would then go to the next most likely. It's the thought process that makes searching the Internet more powerful. All a meta-search engine does is return more noise to you with less typing.