Dogpile
Dogpile's homepage (September 2012)
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Type of site
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Metasearch engine |
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| Available in | English |
| Owner | Blucora, Inc. |
| Created by | Aaron Flin |
| Slogan(s) | All the best search engines piled into one |
| Website | www |
| Alexa rank |
 4,647 (February 2015[update]) |
| Launched | November 1995 |
| Current status | Active |
Dogpile is a metasearch engine for information on the World Wide Web that fetches results from Google, Yahoo!, and Yandex, and includes results from several other popular search engines, including those from audio and video content providers. It is a registered trademark of Blucora, Inc.
Dogpile began operation in November 1995. The site was created and developed by Aaron Flin and later sold to Go2net (which was in turn acquired by Infospace).
From April 2001 to April 2007, Dogpile was primarily symbolized by a dog mascot. Named Arfie, the dog was featured in different themes from seasonal to holidays. From 2005 onwards, Dogpile added a link that gave the user a search query that corresponded with the theme the site was supporting.
In April 2005, Dogpile (owned and operated by InfoSpace, Inc. at the time) collaborated with researchers from University of Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania State University to measure the overlap and ranking differences of leading Web search engines in order to gauge the benefits of using a metasearch engine to search the web. Results found that from 10,316 random user-defined queries from Google, Yahoo!, and Ask Jeeves only 3.2 percent of first page search results were the same across those search engines for a given query. Another study later that year using 12,570 random user-defined queries from Google, Yahoo!, MSN Search, and Ask Jeeves found that only 1.1 percent of first page search results were the same across those search engines for a given query.
These studies showed that each search engine provides vastly different results. While users of the search engine may not recognize a problem, it was shown that they use ~3 search engines per month. Dogpile realized that searchers are not necessarily finding results they were looking for in one search engine and thus decided to redefine their existing metasearch engine to provide the best results.
The Dogpile search engine earned the J.D. Power and Associates award for best Residential Online Search Engine Service in both 2006 and 2007.
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