Back in the day when my siblings and I still had to beg my father for permission to use the internet, my brother came back home for the holidays and said that he wanted to use this new search engine called “Google”. This caused quite a stir and everybody surrounded the computer as he ventured into new territory, because at that time we were all using Altavista and Ananzi for our internet inquiries. Little did we know that this new and strange-looking search engine would soon take over the search-world.
Nowadays when most people turn to the internet in search of answers they open up Google automatically, without shedding much thought on other possibilities that exist. Jargon such as “Google it” has even developed in the place of “see whether you can find it on the internet”. Which can possibly be attributed to the fact that Google is the largest search engine on the World Wide Web today, spreading a wider range of information resources than any other search engine. But also to its first-of-a-kind categorisations – giving you a choice to narrow down your search to a specific area of interest, such as images, books, scholarly articles and even locations on a map. While other search engines have followed this trend created by Google – they’re not quite as comprehensive as Google. But as comprehensive as Google might be, covering the whole of the World Wide Web is still a feat too large to conquer.
And if you really want to conduct a comprehensive search – your best bet is to use Google and a few other search engines as well. While you might believe that using different search engines to conduct the same search (using the same search terms) will provide you with a lot of repetition, you might be surprised to find that it doesn’t. Jux2, a metasearch engine, conducted a study to prove this point – they found that Google and Yahoo!, two very popular search engines had only 3.8 of the same resources in their top 10 results. Even more surprising is that you’ll find a mere 30% correlation between the two search engines, when all of the results are compared.
Another point to consider when you faithfully invest your search-efforts into one search engine is the amount of time you spend browsing through the results. Take for instance any search term that you might enter into the search box. First thing you note is that the search yielded a mass of results that you might not be able to read through in one lifetime. So you browse through the first few and decide that a different point of entry should be considered. You tweak your search term a bit and then the process repeats itself: you read through the first few results and make a decision based on the success of your query. Not a very comprehensive search at all, not even when you are using Google – the most comprehensive of them all.
If you are guilty of skimming the results of one search engine only – and fail to find useful sources every time you employ this search strategy – you might need to consider using other search engines as well. The good news is that there are special search engines that cater exactly for this type of scenario, called metasearch engines. These search engines accepts search terms and apply these search terms to a number of search engines, the results of which are then sorted into either a conglomerated list, or into separate lists each referring to the search engine it resulted from.
Here are some of the ones I use:
Clusty takes your search term and yields results from search engines like Live, Ask, Gigablast and the Open Directory. What makes Clusty special is that it automatically subdivides the results in subject clusters – if you entered a term covering a wide area of interest it might give you clusters of narrower areas of interest within the wider one. If Clusty gets a lot of results covering more or less the same area of interest, it clusters it into one area of interest. Another feature that makes Clusty so special is the different cluster types that it makes – it can cluster results according to results, the sources (the search engines) and the sites (.ac.uk, .com). These clusters are displayed in a box next to the list of actual results – which allows one to either browse through the results in the old-school way, or to find exactly what you are looking for by selecting the relevant clusters.
Killerinfo, one of the first metasearch engines I almost overused at one stage, conducts its search and display of results in much the same fashion as Clusty. Its interface provides reminiscence to the earlier search engines and thus does not look as “cool” as Clusty, but its simplicity might make it more attractive to some – well worth the look.
My favourite thing about Ixquick is the way in which it rates the results it found – through assigning a star for each time a result was located in one of the search engines it uses’ Top 10 results. So if a result has 5 stars – it means that it was located in the top 10 results of five of the search engines in which the search terms were entered. Ixquick uses quite a lot of search engines to draw results from and the best part is that you can alter the amount by selecting or deselecting search engines from the list of available search engines to which the search terms will be sent.
Earlier Jux2 was mentioned because of their correlation study between Google and Yahoo! – their outset is to compare the results of search engines using one search term. Quite handy if you would like to find different resources and compare the difference between using one search engine and using multiple search engines. Well, in this spirit Jux2 will compare the results from Google, Yahoo! and MSN (I believe its Live now). The results are portrayed on one list – much in the same fashion as the above two metasearch engines displaying the best first and so on, but then you can view Google, Yahoo! and Live’s results separately as well. On these separate lists you can see the results found only by that specific search engine as well as the results found by the other two search engines but not by the search engine whose list you are viewing. I think that’s kinda neat!
Now, I must be honest – I don’t know whether it’s politically correct to refer to Intelways as a metasearch engine – we have always referred to it as a “multi-search engine” but in the interest of metasearch, I think I shall let this one slide for now. With that said, I love Intelways – and unfortunately I get side-tracked too often when I get lost in all the possibilities for search that this engine offers. Let me explain. Firstly you enter your search term in a search box, then you select the area of interest that you would like to find results in – like images, video, news, business, academic, tech etc. – when you select your area of interest Intelways provides you with all the search engines listed as pertaining to those areas of interest. Now, the cool part – you simply click on the engine you’d like to conduct the search with and in true frame style it gets done right there and then. And while you skim the surface of your results and feel that the need for change, you are able to select another search engine altogether and the same search is conducted again, but with a different search engine.
Say you are looking for academic papers on the causes of inflation rate increases in South Africa (foreign territory alert…) and you are browsing through the academic search engines’ results, suddenly you realise that it’s big news at the moment, maybe there are some useful news articles that you can read, then you can simply select the news button and you are presented with news search engines while your search term remains the same. I believe that Intelways presents the easiest interface for conducting a comprehensive search using one search term, instead of you having to go to all the different search engines (finding them first) and retyping the same term over and over again – it is given to you on a silver platter.
Zuula is much the same as Intelways, although you do not get the same range of search engines and it does not house the search engines as such. Rather it provides you with a quick and easy tabbed-method of switching in between the search results of Google, Yahoo!, Live, Gigablast and many more search engines. Like Intelways you are provided with the possibility to select a field of interest such as images, news and blog amongst others, each with a list of relevant search engines, between which you can switch while your search term remains the same.
The big thing that one must remember is that metasearch engines, in all their shapes and sizes, will never provide the in depth possibilities that a single search engine will provide – especially Google with its renowned but secret weapon – its PageRank ranking system. But considering the way you search and the principle of referring to more than one source to get valuable information from the World Wide Web, metasearch engines should not be excluded from the way you find information on the web. Hilda always mentions that your best bet will be to use a powerful search engine, such as Google, along side a metasearch engine or two – just to make sure that your coverage is more than average.
So next time you want to find some information resources on the World Wide Web, try some of the metasearch engines above as well – or some of the many others that I haven’t mentioned and see whether it helps improve your searching quests. And of course, happy hunting!
Filed under: Search Tools | Tagged: metasearch
