Google is not the only search engine in the world, and it may not be the best one for your purposes. The index of a single search engine may not be able to give you the most relevant results for your search query. That's where metasearch comes in. A metasearch engine can provide a quick, targeted result which will give you the information you are searching for.

Metasearch engines work by searching the other search engines. All search engines store their results in an index of the content on the web. This index may include page descriptions and words from the web page. Some search engines update their indexes by sending search engine spiders to find information on the web. Others update their indexes by manual submission of new material. Both types of search engine provide their results by querying the database to see what best matches your query.

However, since each search engine only uses its own index, what you get is one search engine's view of what's relevant. Metasearch improves on that by searching the indexes of several search engines at once, including the most important ones. The beauty of a metasearch engine is that it then uses its own algorithm to determine which results best match what you are searching for. For example, a metasearch engine might look at how many times the links on one search engine were clicked when a search term was typed in. The more clicks a link gets, the more relevant it must be to the search and the higher it will rank in metasearch results.

With a metasearch engine you also have access to the results of the individual search engines. Most metasearch engines include links to their sources in the results and you can click on them to get only the results of one search engine. This means that metasearch engines make it easy to get access to all the main search engines from one page, cutting down on your search time. You may also be able to tell which search engine had the most results, depending on the metasearch engine that you use.

Presenting Metasearch Information

Some metasearch engines group searches together by keywords so that you can further refine your search. It's an easy way to see what other phrases were found with your search term. Another way to present that information is to use related search terms. Many metasearch engines give you links to these phrases so that you can dig even deeper into your chosen topic.

Metasearch engines make an excellent research tool. Some metasearch engines also allow you to search for news, books, auctions, music, jobs, photos, downloads and much more. Like other search engines, metasearch engines have evolved so that they provide more of the information that people are looking for.

When you search with a regular search engine you may see duplicate results. Multiply that by five, ten ore more and that's a lot of wasted time looking at information that you have already seen. A good metasearch engine will save you time by filtering out the duplicates, making it a more efficient way of searching the World Wide Web.