Meta Search Engines

A meta search engine searches multiple search engines from a single search page.

Meta search engines work in various ways. With some, a single, simultaneous search retrieves results from multiple sources, usually with the duplicates removed. Others offer a separate search of multiple content sources, allowing you to select the source(s) you want for each search.

When a single simultanous search is offered, only a limited maximum muber of pages from each source are returned. The cut-off may be determined by the number of pages retrieved, or by the amount of time the meta engine spends at the other sites. Results retrieved by these engines can be highly relevant, since they are usually grabbing the first items from the relevancy-ranked list of results returned by the individual search engines. Keep in mind that complex searches, such as field searches, are usually not available.

When to use a meta search engine

When you want to retrieve a relatively small number of relevant results
When your topic is obscure
When you are not having luck finding what you want
When you want the convenience of searching a variety of different content sources from one search page

Examples of meta search engines

Each one is a little different, using different indexes and sources. For example, Fasteagle searches a variety of popular sites, including YouTube, Delicious, Digg, and eBay. Yooci is nice if you're tired of getting huge numbers of results, since it will return no more than 250 Web pages per search.

Let's look at an example. Let's say you're interested in the effect of television violence on children. Here is a search for violence television children. Notice how the sources of the results are placed with each page returned with this search.

tip! You can see a list of additional meta engines by visiting Internet Search Engines.

Let's move on to a consideration of concept categorizing search engines >>.

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