Frustrated by search?

Irritated with irrelevant results?

There maybe a better albeit still imperfect way. Metasearch.

Metasearch engines combines the results from multiple search engines in order to give searchers a better look at result sets.

Searching for a term on any of the big three search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) will yield results that are different. There may or may not be some overlap. A metasearch engine aggregates the results from all three (and sometimes others) and attempts to provide a better list of relevant results. The goal of any search engine is to provide answers to a searcher's questions. The metasearch engine has the advantage of pulling those "answers" from multiple sources. In the process of combining results, the better metasearch engines will eliminate duplicates. The best ones will allow users to view the results in comparison mode. A column is displayed for the results from the metasearch engine, then a column from Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. By giving searchers not only their own aggregated results, but also the comparison results, meta engines provide a far greater ability to find answers to questions.

Metasearch engines should be called a Searcher's Search Engine because they are geared towards helping the searcher. There is another kind of search engine called the Marketer's Search Engine which I discuss in a separate article. These kind of search engines, while still helpful to searchers, are more heavily helpful to marketers.

Remember, the goal is to find answers to questions. Having the ability to see all the relevant data, instead of one slice of the data, will help users find the answer(s) much more quickly.

There are two metasearch engines that I would recommend.

Dogpile is probably the most well known of the metasearch engines. Myriad Search is little known tool used mainly by a small niche of people. However, both are helpful in seeing aggregated and comparison results.

Reasons to use metasearch:

*find answers to questions from a broader base of results
*find better results
*make searching easier
*understand the big three search engines
*compare the big three search engines
*use big three analysis to improve SEO

Paul Flyer writes and maintains Recommended Web Tools, an online resource for web development beginners.