Metacrawler Does Go2Net Proud

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Metacrawler is still the class of the metasearch engines, but some others are worth a spin. Still Hot: Metacrawler Go2Net's flagship metasearch engine, Metacrawler, remains very popular, and does a lot of little things right. The customization is nice, the speed is good, and you can set longer timeouts if you want to make sure you check slower-responding engines. Other little touches include: Country-specific search option: you can check as many of 27 countries as you would like to search, and results will o­nly be returned from those country-specific domains Related searches are suggested; any, all, or phrase search options clearly displayed; some additional bells and whistles like MP3 and auction searches power searching allows you to specify the time you're willing to wait for the search, and gives you the option to display results by relevance (consolidated) or by search engine (in serial order) The best feature of all, in my view, is the customization. Many of us have a certain way we'd like to use a search engine time and again. Wouldn't it be nice if the thing used cookies to remember which search engines you like to search, whether you prefer to default to "any" or "all keywords, what country domains you search, and various other default settings? Metacrawler does this. We can hope for much more extensive use of these techniques from our search engines in the future. Being able to customize your preferences is what it's all about.   Another great feature is the ability to click o­n the search results from just o­ne of the engines, if you're interested in o­ne set of results in particular.   Every rose has its thorn. We're prompted to check out the "new Metacrawler directory." You guessed it, dmoz strikes again.   The development team at Metacrawler has thought of pretty much everything. It's still a great meta-search tool.   Overall: 3 stars.   Cool: Ixquick Recently, I stumbled across this metasearch site called Ixquick that no o­ne's ever heard of. Don't let the unassuming interface fool you: this o­ne really works! The best part, of course, is Ixquick's innovative results reporting format. A site o­nly gets rated by the number of times it appears in the top ten search engine results for a given search term. So for example if a particular site turns up in the top ten results for "Florida Marlins" o­n Excite, Google, and dmoz, Ixquick assigns it three stars. Most meta-search engines do it differently, assigning an aggregate score.   The star system seems to filter out the search engine spammers in many cases. Excite in particular seems to have trouble with spam. But even if someone is successful in exploiting the foibles in o­ne search engine to get a top ten ranking under a given search term, the site will o­nly get o­ne star o­n Ixquick, likely keeping it out of your sight as you focus o­n consistent high rankers with three, five, or seven stars.   You need to try it out to get a true feel for Ixquick's power. This is why we're asking people to try our meta-search showdown. Here we pit Traffick Metasearch (powered by Mamma, which is a Metacrawler-like metasearcher, albeit not quite as good) against Ixquick and ask you to vote o­n your preference. They behave quite differently in practice.   If you try it out, you'll quickly notice how relevant your results are. Most of the time, anyway.   Ixquick's developer has made a point of tailoring Ixquick to the habits of the search engines it queries. As a consequence, Ixquick is particularly strong o­n phrase searching and Boolean operators.   Overall: 2.5 stars   Getting Warmer: Mamma and Debriefing/Baldey Mamma is o­ne of the hundred or more metasearch tools which fall into the category of "Metacrawler wannabes." Though clearly not as good as Metacrawler, Mamma has an attractive interface, and is nearly as good. Some people just like a cool name. And for some users, fewer customization options may actually be preferable.   Debriefing is a meta-search tool that evidently got popular due to the sheer novelty of metasearch engines, a phenomenon I mentioned in the last article. It's always been a high quality tool with a simple interface, but it lacks some customization options. It's also the case that development of Debriefing may be up in the air since it was acquired by Surfboard.nl, a leading portal company in the Netherlands. Surfboard uses the Debriefing technology for its search component, and according to company management, the technology is going to be licensed to various European portal companies. Debriefing/Surboard, then, could very well become important players in Europe. In particular, they may enjoy rapid growth to satisfy the enormous demand for multilingual and multinational search technologies. Metacrawler has already charged into this field, and Ixquick's developer is also working o­n versions in different languages.   A slightly more customizable, but so far little-used, version of Debriefing has been launched under the name Baldey. When I tried Baldey, it returned results not unlike Metacrawler's. It seems that the vast majority of the traffic for Debriefing and Baldey in the future, though, could be through various portals which deploy their technology.   Overall (Both Mamma and the Debriefing group): 2 stars   Dogpile Dogpile is popular with children and AOL users (I'm kidding!). To me, there's nothing you can do o­n Dogpile that you can't do better with Go2Net's main metasearch tool, Metacrawler. It does work quickly and efficiently, and looks OK.   Dogpile's results reporting format may be favored by some users, but the majority of us don't prefer a "serial" reporting format, preferring the consolidated results offered by most others. It should be reiterated that Metacrawler can actually be set to return results in consolidated or serial format. So Dogpile must have been acquired for its large user base, in something of a defensive maneuver by Go2Net. Later o­n, they can let users in o­n the fact that Metacrawler is far superior.   Since this is a family web site, rather than calling Dogpile cool, hot, or otherwise, I'll leave the thermometer and Humidex readings to your imagination.   Please Click if you like this on google plus.