Meta-search engines

A metasearch engine (or aggregator) is a search tool that uses another search engine's data to produce their own results from the Internet. Metasearch engines take input from a user and simultaneously send out queries to third party search engines for results. Sufficient data is gathered, formatted by their ranks and presented to the users.

However, Metasearch also has issues. Scores of websites stored on search engines are all different: this can draw in irrelevant documents. Other problems such as spamming also significantly reduce the accuracy of the search. The process of fusion aims to tackle this issue and improve the engineering of a metasearch engine.

There are many types of metasearch engines available to allow users to access specialised information in a particular field. These include Savvysearch engine and Metaseek engine.

"Why search the web with one search engine when you can search them all - or at least several?" This was the question tackled by researchers following a search engine review that found different search engines to be producing different results because of the different algorithms on which each was based.

The first person to incorporate the idea of meta searching was Colorado State University's Daniel Dreilinger. He revealed SearchSavvy, which let users search up to 20 different search engines and directories at once. Although fast, the search engine was restricted to simple searches and thus wasn't too reliable. University of Washington student Eric Selberg released a more "updated" version called MetaCrawler. This search engine improved on SearchSavvy's accuracy by adding its own search syntax behind the scenes, and matching the syntax to that of the search engines it was probing. Metacrawler reduced the amount of search engines queried to 6, but although it produced more accurate results, it still wasn't considered as accurate as searching a query in an individual engine.

Another metasearch engine was created in May 20, 1996. HotBot, owned by Wired at the time, was a search engine with search results coming from the Inktomi and Direct Hit database. It was known at the time for its fast results and funky name, and as a search engine with the ability to search within search results. Upon being bought by Lycos in 1998, development for the search engine staggered and its market share fell drastically. After going through a few alterations, HotBot was redesigned into a simplified search interface, with its features being incorporated into Lycos' website redesign.

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Wikipedia