I referred to ‘metasearch engines’ in my last post and some of you may be wondering what they are. In essence, they are programs that search across several search engines at once. Since the internet is too large for any one search engine to index completely, by using a metasearch engine you will obtain more comprehensive results. Using metasearch engines also saves you from having to repeat your search in multiple individual search engines.
Next time you need to search the internet, try one of these metasearch engines:
- Clusty: displays results in categories, or clusters, thus helping narrow down your search
- Dogpile: suggests related searches as an aid to narrowing your search
- Ixquick: searches across 14 search engines and databases. Ranks results by number of search engines the site is indexed by.
One of my favourite metasearch engines is Kartoo, which displays search results in a visual map, showing related websites. Hover your mouse over a website and an image of it with a short description is displayed on the left. Also displayed are a list of terms that you can click on to use to drill down to narrow your search. Give it a try and see what you think.
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