The majority of people searching the web go to their favorite search engine and start typing keywords. However, each engine uses its own methods for ranking results and may leave out results which you later find to be important. On the other hand, meta search engines submit requests to many primary search engines (such as Google, Yahoo, etc.) and gather a broader set of results, reducing the chance of missing important results.
What are meta search engines?
Meta search engines are either programs or websites that send requests to multiple primary search engines, combine the results together, and display them. They don't index the web or have a database themselves, because they ask the primary search engines for results.
How do meta search engines work?
Once you have typed in a word or phrase and started the search, meta search engines forward the request to many primary search engines. Since each primary engine has its own syntax for requesting results, meta engines modify the request for each individual primary engine.
Meta search engines usually send requests out simultaneously. This way, the requests get processed in parallel, saving time. Some meta engines can only get one, or at most several, pages of results from each primary engine. A few meta search engines can get as many results from a primary engine as that engine can supply, very helpful if you're doing an in-depth search.
Once all the results have been received, the next step is to eliminate duplicate results and display them, usually sorted by the engine that supplied the result, the rank of the result, or the relevance of the result. Some meta search engines can resort results based on user preferences.
What are the disadvantages of meta search engines?
1. Timeouts or long waits may occur if the meta search engine is having difficulty contacting the primary engine.
2. Many meta search engines only get the top 10 to 50 results per primary engine.
3. Some advanced features (ex. phrase searching) may not be available.
4. Many meta search engines exclude one or more of the major primary search engines (Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo).
Each meta search engine has its own way of dealing with these problems. In fact, one way of ranking meta engines is to go through this list and see how well each one is able to handle each of these objections.
What are the advantages of meta search engines?
1. Searching with many primary search engines often finds results missed by a single primary engine.
2. Requesting results from many primary engines in parallel saves time.
3. Eliminating duplicate results also saves time.
4. Getting results from many different primary engines provides opportunities to explore how to best combine the separate result lists.
The problem of how to combine lists of results from different search engines provides an opportunity to use sophisticated methods to help rank, index, and cluster results so the most relevant results can be easily found. This is an ongoing research area and methods such as latent semantic analysis have been developed to help solve this problem.
Meta Search Engine Definition
Most meta-search engines use similar technology and there are few differences from one to the next. Infospace, the company that currently owns some of the largest and most comprehensive meta-searches, operates four separate meta-search engines that are basically the same with only small differences in their technology.
Infospace and its related Meta searches take up around 1% of the search market, and bring in over $250 million in market revenue as of 2005 (Yahoo! Finance). There are numerous, tiny little start-ups and individuals bidding for the remaining search traffic.
Despite the competition, there are several small meta-search engines that make a large profit, like mamma.com: According to Yahoo! Finance, Mamma receives less than .1% of the searches, yet maintains a current market value of about $30 million dollars. Even a small meta-search engine like Juxt2.com, which was down for a year and operating totally illegally (scraping content from Yahoo! and Google without permission), when it was running, sold for over $100k on eBay. Thus the Meta search engine market is ripe for people to enter and exit.
The search engines do not generally view meta-searches as competition. This is seen in their partnership agreements with many smaler meta-search engines like mamma.com, metacrawler.com and donkeydo.com.
But before the meta-search engines can operate, they first require the consent of the search engine from which they want to get their information. It is common knowledge that having legal permission to meta-search the major search engines and directories is important enough to have market value all by itself.
Here are a couple examples of meta-search engines that required only a minimal commitment of time and energy:
Myriad Pro meta-search is a completely free meta-search engine programmed by an S.E.O. consultant in twenty hours by his own estimates (the source will be released as open source very soon), Myriad Pro search has several advanced features not even found in commercial Meta search engines.
As a result, Myriad maxes out every day with the number of allowed searches for a non-commercial search and is in the process of being mirrored all over the world as a free meta-search engine.
Helios is a powerful meta-search engine script that has the ability to plug in to multiple information sources (search engines, directories, etc.). It was designed in under a year by a computer science academic. It works extremely well and the entire code is open source, meaning anyone can take it and build commercial applications on it.
Relatively easy to program and requiring a minimal commitment compared to the regular search engines, perhaps meta- search engines have a chance in an online arena increasingly populated by users who want a more targeted search engine experience without the bias of any of the major search engines.
Do I think they'll ever gain a major piece of the search engine pie? Alas, I don't, but I wish them the best of luck.
Both Chuck Paulson & Aurora Brown are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
Chuck Paulson has sinced written about articles on various topics from Computers and The Internet. Chuck Paulson has over 12 years experience using and building meta search engines. He has recently released the simple-to-use , powered by. Chuck Paulson's top article generates over 1600 views. to your Favourites.
Aurora Brown has sinced written about articles on various topics from Banking, Auto Insurance and Europe Travel. A.M. Brown writes for Acclivity, Inc, a Los Angeles based company that provides web design, search engine marketing, blog optimization services, SEO and professional writing services. See. Aurora Brown's top article generates over 12100 views. to your Favourites.
