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Aug 27, 2002 Last week, it was discussed that there were two major types of search engines; namely the site indexing services, (Google, AltaVista, DMOZ, etc.) and then the meta search engines. Site indexing involved submitting sites, and then depending upon content, linking popularity, and how much cash the owner of the site had at their disposal, you would get whatever information you requested based upon your search term. Enter the Meta-Search engine: With hundreds of search engines in addition to what we've described earlier, a meta-search engine will "pool" results and give you a list from information its garnered from several search engines. This way you don't find yourself search engine hopping, so long as the information given is what you're after. Keeping accuracy in mind, here are a few of the better meta-search engines: 1. Dogpile: Returns the results consumers seek from top quality search engines such as Ah-ha.com, Ask Jeeves, FAST, FindWhat, Inktomi, LookSmart, Overture and Sprinks to name a few. Owned by InfoSpace, Dogpile also supplies the search engines for NBCi, Metacrawler, Webcrawler, and several others. 2. Mamma.com: Started as a master's thesis at Ottawa University, Mamma currently services over 13.5 million customers a month, and delivers results to over 14,000 third party search engines. Boasting a 97% coverage of all queries, Mamma takes her results from DMOZ, AskJeeves, Entireweb, and LookSmart. 3. Ixquick: Very clean interface, this meta search engine claims over 1 million searches per day. It also takes the results a step further by giving you 1 - 5 stars in order to rank pages by how they fared with all search engines that were queried. 4. 7Search: Claims up to 35% of the top 150 search engines are using their results. Gives "TopTens" to rank relevancy on results on left side of the page, and then right hand side is devoted to pay-per-click placement. 5. ProFusion: ProFusion not only claims to handle searches utilizing Yahoo, AltaVista, All The Web, and other search indexes, it also will search what it calls the "invisible web," a collection of databases, facts and figures that are not available from search engines, i.e. Adobe PDF libraries, encyclopedias, etc. So who actually wins when it comes to indexing vs. meta? Certainly those who index get their search results made available, the meta search engines propagate their own banners and means of advertising, making it a win-win for everyone. Best advice? Find one that works for you, and stick with it. Besides, there's alot more to how you search than to where you search. But more on that next week, with tips on actually what to place in that search box of yours, and a few web tools that are designed to make the web even more accessible and functional. See you then! ------------ Next week: Meta searches, spidering, robots, and other web crawling search services. ------------ Clark Bartron has been a web designer and Internet researcher for over 6 years. Visit http://htmloquence.onlyhere.net and AskTheVillageIdiot.com for more information. Email Clark: cbartron@mail2webmaster.com Comment on this column in the forum. ------------ |
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