The Meta Search Engines – Web Searcher’s Best Friends

The Meta Search Engines – Web Searcher’s Best Friends
By Liz Chris

What are Meta Search Engines?

The fast meta crawler search engine technology to search the top search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Ask) simultaneously in real time. They mostly do not ‘cache’ search results like other major search engines.
Also, the meta search tools do not have their own database like other major search engines. They send your query to several search engines or directories at once, and retrieve all the results onto the same page. The main purpose of the meta search technology is to save time by using several search engines at the same time, helping you find the best search results. The meta search engines can perform searches on videos, images, news, blogs, shopping, directories, articles, audio, forums etc etc by sending search request to appropriate web portals.

videos:- Can be searched through for relevant keyword on video sharing sites.
images:- major image or picture portals
directories:- mainly dmoz & some other directories
shopping:- price comparison shopping search engines
blogs:- blogging sites
news:- major news portal

How do Meta Search Engines Work?
It analyses and retrieve search results, removes duplicates results, urls, and delivers the best results that each individual search engine has to offer for your specific search term or keyword. They record all the above information, and then manipulate this data through certain defined algorithm, such as removing duplicates contents, urls.

The meta search engine also display the ranking, and relevancy urls (web sites) on each search engine for your search term/keyword which was calculated by an algorithm that count the number of time the link was found in the search engines and the keyword position on them.
After they have processed the results, they create an HTML page with all the results listed for the end user for the better search results.

Clustering Technology
Some have their own features which they use on top of meta search results, which the feature is called “clustering”. (which is grouping by topic). Also, some have functions like snapshots of web sites in their search results, customisable features or functions, and also few of them are is made for asking questions in natural language and visual search results.

What Features/Functions?
These are the few features that a meta search engine should have like other major search engines. The search can be performed to produce more effective results by using advanced syntax parameters or advanced search options.

With All Words: You can use the + between the keywords or use the AND between those keywords. Our search results will produce the results which contains those keywords only.
e.g: uk+crawler or uk AND crawler
With Phrase: You can use the phrase within quotes(”"), if all the words have to appear as a phrase in your search results.
e.g: “uk search engine”
With Any Words: This is the normal way of searching. You can type any keywords maximum 5 or 6 keywords to obtain a search results.
e.g: “uk meta search engine web directory”
Without Words: You can use the – between the keywords or use the NOT between those keywords. Our search results will produce the results without that omitted keyword.
e.g: uk-crawler or uk NOT crawler
Complex Words: You can use the +/- between the keywords to perform the complex task to obtain the search results.
e.g: uk+search+engine-directory

Special Fields Search:

In Site/Host: The pages must be located on a certain domain name or particular website.
e.g: host:www.ukcrawler.co.uk or site:www.ukcrawler.co.uk
In URL: This will find pages or subdirectory for that particular keyword within the url.
e.g: url:loan will find www.ukcrawler.co.uk/loan & www.loan
In Title: This will find those specific website/s which containing that specific keywords in the title
e.g: title:UK Meta Search Engine or title:UK Search Engine
Define: This will search for the Definition/Information for that defined keyword in the dictionary.
Define:loan

The meta search engines are a web searcher’s best true friend.

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