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[B487]Best Meta Search Engine

by Chuck Paulson, Chu

Meta search engines can help find results you might otherwise miss. However, combining results from many engines into a single list brings up some issues. By understanding the problems and their solutions, you can choose a better meta search engine to use.

Problems that Affect Meta Search Engine Rankings

1) How to judge the importance of results? If there was broad agreement between the major search engines, ordering search results would be straightforward. Unfortunately, numerous studies have shown there is surprisingly little overlap among the top results of the major search engines.

In hindsight this is not surprising since there is enormous pressure to get high rankings using dubious tactics such as link farming or hidden content only seen by search engines. The result is a lot of “noise” in rankings when compared over different search engines.

2) How to pinpoint areas of interest? Many search engines offer suggestions for search terms that help focus on your area of interest. Eventually though, you have to look through lists of results. If meta search engines can help pinpoint interesting results in the list through indexing, clustering, or re-ranking, that saves your valuable time.

Ranking Methods used by Meta Search Engines

1) Original ranking – one method is just to use the original rankings returned by the search engines. Some adjustment is necessary to break ties or boost results perceived to be more relevant. For example, dogpile.com changes the original ranking based on what search terms are used.

* Problematic – different search engine ranking methods are probably not compatible.

2) Vote ranking – an interesting method of ranking is to order by votes, where a web page gets a vote each time it is in the top 10 results of a search engine. Some meta search engines, such as Ixquick.com show you how many votes each result got.

* Good – however not many web pages get multiple votes.

3) Filtered ranking – this method is based on whether results contain certain words or phrases. You can choose words or phrases that filter out results or keep certain results with desirable phrases. Many desktop-based meta search engines have this feature.

* Useful but brittle - a result may be ruled in or out by accident depending on what specific word the author used.

4) Cluster ranking – once you have settled on good search words or phrases, eventually you must look through a list of results and pick out the most relevant ones. Clustering puts results into similar groups so that instead of looking through one long list, you immediately rule out non-relevant groups and concentrate on smaller lists of relevant groups. Clusty.com uses clustering to group results into smaller lists that are easier to search.

* Good – depending on the size and quality of the clusters.

5) Relevance ranking – Besides looking at the content of the search results, the latest meta search engines, such as iMetaSearch, can also look at which results you have marked as relevant and sort results based on your feedback. These meta search engines can re-order the results or clusters to automatically find results and clusters similar to the one you have marked.

* Good – user feedback is taken into account and all words plus their context are used to find similar results, not just a few specific words.

Metasearch is a great way to search several search engines at once. It's effectively a way of querying the indexes of dozens of search engines. If you want to search Google, Yahoo, Live and Ask at the same time, then metasearch is the only viable option. However, not all searches are alike. There are terms you can use to get make your searches on a metasearch engine even more efficient. This means you will get better results. One way to do this is with search operators. Here's a guide to some of the main ones.

Searching With Quotes

One way to force a search engine to search for a phrase rather than individual words is to enclose the phrase in inverted commas. For example, as search for the words dog collars will return web pages with the word 'dog' and web pages with the word 'collars'. Think how many of those pages there are and you will realize that you need a way to tell the search engines what you really need. If you put the phrase 'dog collars' in inverted commas, then the search engine will search for the phrase rather than individual words.

Plus And Minus

The plus and minus signs are common math symbols, but they are also used with search engines. The plus sign shows that a particular term is required (for example dog+collar returns only results that have ). In contrast, the minus sign shows that a particular word or phrase should be excluded from the search (example: dog-collar)

Going Boolean

Some search engines also use Boolean operators, which narrow a search. The Boolean term AND narrows your search. It means that both or all of the terms linked by AND need to be included in the search results. (example: dog AND collar). In contrast, to broaden your search, you can use the Boolean operator OR (example: dog OR collar). This tells the search engine to search for either word. Finally, you can use the operator NOT to search for pages that contain one term but not another (example: dog NOT collar).

Combinations

You may also be able to combine some of the operators above to get an even more focused search. For example, you could search for "dog collar" NOT labrador, so that you didn't get any results about that particular breed of dog. You could search for "dog collar" +"Jack Russell" to find a site that offers dog collars for these small dogs.

How This Works With Metasearch

One issue for using operators with metasearch is that metasearch engines are searching other search engines, and all search engines have their own ways of using operators and querying their databases. This means that not all operators work with every metasearch engine and in some cases this can skew the results. However, there are other metasearch engines that use the accepted operators for each search engine they query, making the results you get totally reliable - as long as the indexes are up to date.

Article Source : Pg. 141

About Author

Both Chuck Paulson & Greg Aldrich 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 meta search engine at. Chuck Paulson's top article generates over 1600 views. to your Favourites.

Greg Aldrich has sinced written about articles on various topics from Computers and The Internet, Free Credit Report Score and Credit Cards. Greg Aldrich created the Widow.com in 1996 and continues to host and manage it today. Widow searches multiple search engine indexes in parallel and displays. Greg Aldrich's top article generates over 12100 views. to your Favourites.