Meta searching

Accessing search engines like AOL’s Netfind is one thing, but how do you fancy searching on eight engines at once? Or even more!

As part of the ongoing Web building articles I’ve been writing, I’ve been taking a look at search engines, with a view to putting together some information on getting the best possible search engine placement for your site.

One of the problems that applies to the concept is that a listing on one engine alone is not really of any use – you really need to have as high a ranking as possible on as many of the top search engines as possible. Obviously, I needed to check whether the strategies I’d adopted were working, and so I spent far too long trudging around the search engines I’d identified as being my targets typing searches in.

It didn’t take me too long to remember that, ages ago, I’d come across meta search utilities – indeed, we’d mentioned them on the mag before now, so I decided to play with a few different engines.

I actually picked up on four desktop Meta Search programs – each of which is available in our Top Software download library – Web Inspector, WebFerret, FirstStop and Copernic 2001 Basic. All of them are available in trial versions – free to download, free to use – and each brings with it different styles of use and slightly different lists of search engines they use.

Finding

It’s actually quite exciting watching the program of your choice doing its searches – and even more interesting to see how the results are collated. For instance, it becomes very obvious that getting listings on a small number of search engines propagates your site to lots and lots of others – something I’ll be covering in the Web Building article on search engine placement. It’s also very interesting to see how the various engines “rank” your site, and place it in an order alongside others for given keyword combinations.

This leads me to believe that, in order to get the best out of Web searching, you really do need to be using a Meta Search tool, otherwise you’ll be missing out on a great many sites you might not otherwise pick up.

How so?

This is because more and more search engines are now taking payment for listings. I suppose it’s worthy of note that there are actually two main types of search engines – pure crawlers, and directories. Crawlers actually get out onto the Web and index the sites they find by following links from sites they already know about. They can also be seeded by site submissions.

Directories, on the other hand, tend to have human operators “reviewing” sites and adding them to a categorised directory. Either way, we humans tend to just clatter in the key words we want to search on, and let the search routines do their bit, which is where the Meta Search tools come in.

The only problem is, if they include Directories in their targeted engines, the paid-for listings can obscure other listings, especially if you limit the Meta Searcher to ten entries per search engine.

It’s worth being aware of this, and configuring your chosen tool to not limit itself as far as possible.

With that borne firmly in mind, Meta Searching is simply a matter of refining your search terms until you’ve found what you need in your chosen tool.

I’m not going to blether on much more. Instead, I’ll recommend that you get into the Top Software library and download yourself a couple or three of the Meta Search tools you’ll find there (right at the top in Upload Date order) and have a play. Once you’ve found the one that suits you, you’ll never look back.

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David Dorn