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Metasearching the Web Why use one Internet search engine when you can use them all? Kai Chandler reports on the latest metasearch engines. If you use the web then you’ll probably know about search engines. Just enter one or more words to search through millions of pages on the web and the search engine will present you with a report listing web sites to visit. If you want a demonstration, click on AOL’s search icon in the top right corner of the AOL client. Next, click on the box that says “Search the net using aol search.” Of course you’ll need to think of something to search on. How about my name? Kai Chandler. AOL search comes up with a creditable three hits on my KidzSoft WebZone site or references to that site in the first three pages reported. There are hundreds of other search engines that you could use. Google and Altavista are my favourites. However, not all search engines are created equal and for any particular search, you can be sure that one engine will be better than another. So, which should you use? An answer is to use a metasearch engine. These fire off search requests to other search engines and collate the results that come back. With luck you should have an extremely thorough result in just a few seconds. Some of the best metasearch engines on the web according to Danny Sullivan’s excellent Search Engine News (http://www.calafia.com) are: Go2net (http://www.go2net.com) An alternative approach is to load a program onto your PC which triggers off the requests to other search engines. The best two I’ve come across are WebFerret, and Copernic 2000. Both exist in both freeware and professional versions. WebFerret is simplicity itself. Enter the search phrase and select from four search options. These are whether all keywords are required, any key word is required, or the exact phrase is needed. A fourth option allows you to build more complex selection criteria by use of And, Or and brackets. You can also save searches for subsequent reuse. Copernic 2000 trades simplicity for power. Not only does it store search criteria but it also saves the results of searches for later analysis. You can find text in the search results which may be useful if you are looking for a particular result. Searches can be on all the major search engines or you can select categories such as Books, Hardware or Software. Other categories require that you upgrade to the commercial versions. As a consumer test, I searched each engine for links to my web site KidzSoft WebZone. The results were as follows:
* Included for comparison ** Freeware software. *** Alphabetic listing As you can see, Dogpile is the highest scoring web-based metasearch engine, while Webferret is the highest scoring PC based engine. Copernic certainly wins if you are looking for advanced features.
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