Metasearch engine

[5] Examples of metasearch engines include Skyscanner and Kayak.com, which aggregate search results of online travel agencies and provider websites.

[6] The first person to incorporate the idea of meta searching was University of Washington student Eric Selberg,[7] who published a paper about his MetaCrawler experiment in 1995.

Upon being bought by Lycos in 1998, development for the search engine staggered and its market share fell drastically.

[10] A metasearch engine called Anvish was developed by Bo Shu and Subhash Kak in 1999; the search results were sorted using instantaneously trained neural networks.

In April 2005, Dogpile, then owned and operated by InfoSpace, Inc., collaborated with researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania State University to measure the overlap and ranking differences of leading Web search engines in order to gauge the benefits of using a metasearch engine to search the web.

[17] By sending multiple queries to several other search engines this extends the coverage data of the topic and allows more information to be found.

They use the indexes built by other search engines, aggregating and often post-processing results in unique ways.

[2] Metasearching is also a useful approach if the purpose of the user's search is to get an overview of the topic or to get quick answers.

The number of hyperlinks generated by metasearch engines are limited, and therefore do not provide the user with the complete results of a query.

[19] Metasearching also gives the illusion that there is more coverage of the topic queried, particularly if the user is searching for popular or commonplace information.

This is a problem because Metasearch engines rely heavily on the consistency of this data to generate reliable accounts.

To tackle Spamdexing, search robot algorithms are made more complex and are changed almost every day to eliminate the problem.

[27] It is a major problem for metasearch engines because it tampers with the Web crawler's indexing criteria, which are heavily relied upon to format ranking lists.