The Benefits Of Metasearch Engines

The use of metasearch engines hasn't caught on with the general population. Most everyone still defaults to one of the major search engines - most often Google.

But we should be aware of metasearch engines and the benefits of using them. From Wikipedia:
A metasearch engine (or aggregator) is a search tool that uses another search engine's data to produce their own results from the Internet.[1][2] 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.

Information stored on the World Wide Web is constantly expanding, making it increasingly impossible for a single search engine to index the entire web for resources. A metasearch engine is a solution to overcome this limitation. By combining multiple results from different search engines, a metasearch engine is able to enhance the user’s experience for retrieving information, as less effort is required in order to access more materials. A metasearch engine is efficient, as it is capable of generating a large volume of data. 

In essence, you can use a metasearch engine to run queries and compile results from all of the various serious engines. 

Two metasearch engines are Dogpile and Ixquick.

From Dogpile's About page:
InfoSpace created the Dogpile search engine because your time is important to us. Powered by Metasearch technology, Dogpile returns all the best results from leading search engines including Google and Yahoo!, so you find what you’re looking for faster. Each search engine has its own method of searching and each will return different results. Dogpile looks at all of them, decides which are most relevant to your search, eliminates duplicates and reveals them to you. In the end, you get a list of results more complete than anywhere else on the Web.

From Ixquick's About page:
Ixquick search results are more comprehensive and more accurate than other search engines.  Ixquick's unique capabilities include an Advanced Search, a global search and power refinement. Professional researchers rely on advanced search methods such as Boolean logic, phrases, wildcards, and field searches. But different search engines support different advanced search methods, and require the user to access them in different ways. Keeping track of these differences can be time-consuming and burdensome. Ixquick solves this problem by understanding which advanced search methods each search engine supports, and how to access them.

These are powerful search engines that do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. Why run a search limited to one search engine's algorithm and results when you can run a search across multiple search engines at one time? The answer seems obvious. 

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