metasearch engines

[Greg Notess]

        A couple of other points to bear in mind about metasearch engines
and why they will not be comprehensive:

1. None of them search Northern Light, one of the largest of the Web
indexes. This is because Northern Light has chosen not to allow metasearch
engines to search their site; thus, even Cyber411 which lists Northern
Light does not actually search it.

2. Many of them also fail to get results from HotBot or any of the other
Inktomi-based databases, which are also among the largest of the Web indexes. 

3. In many cases, a single search on HotBot (or AltaVista or Northern Light
etc.) will find more hits than a search on a metasearch engine. Why?
Because most multiple search engines only retrieve 10-50 hits from each of
the databases they search.

4. Some not only return hits from search engines, but ads and other
internal links on search engine's page as well. 

        While I continue to advocate searching several Web databases for
comprehensive searches, the multi-search engines do not seem to be the best
approach. I do find them useful when I have a unique term or phrase that
may only find a dozen or so hits from the largest of the search engines.
Even so, I will typically also search on Northern Light and HotBot. 
        See the section on multiple search engines on my Search Engine
Showdown site at <http://imt.net/~notess/search/multip.html> for more of my
own analysis of these as well as links to a few of my columns in ONLINE on
the topic.  

==> Greg R. Notess      align at montana.edu    <http://imt.net/~notess/>
              406-994-6563 (w) 406-585-2287 (h)

--> On the Net columnist for ONLINE and DATABASE
     "Government Information on the Internet" 
          Bernan Press, 2nd ed. Oct. 1998