[WEB4LIB] metasearch engines

[Ward Price]

At 07:28 AM 10/23/1998 -0700, you wrote:
>Dear Colleagues,
>Having used many search engines over a long time period, I am becoming
>more interested in metasearch engines (i.e., Dogpile, Metacrawler,
>Inference Find).  Because we possibly all agree that it is necessary to
>search more than one engine for the most comprehensive results, I am
>wondering why metasearch tools aren't used exclusively.
>

Metasearch engines are slow, time consuming, etc.  Search engines are
imperfect at best.  If you use a metasearch engine, are you improving the
system, or just multiplying the imperfection?  IF you can find what you
need with one search engine, why search others.  (Sure you can't always
find what you need, and perhaps more important, you might think you find
what you need, when really you don't.)

We're always fighting the battle against search engines.  We have 35 search
engines/catalogs listed on our Web site, but we also have over 30 web
indexes the students can, and usually should search when they're doing
their research.  I'm worried about teaching them to use  Contemporary
Literary Criticism Select, Biological Abstracts, IDEAL Journals, Nursing
Collection, or Periodical Abstracts on the web, not Metacrawler.

Ward Price  
C. Ward Price    wprice at panam.edu
 Instruction/Reference/Web Librarian
  University of Texas-Pan American
         Edinburg, Texas  78539
        http://www.lib.panam.edu/