Metasearch engine

A metasearch engine (or aggregator) is a search tool that uses another search engine's data to produce its own results from the Internet. Metasearch engines take input from a user and simultaneously send out queries to third party search engines for results. Sufficient data is gathered, formatted by their ranks and presented to the users. A metasearch engine (or aggregator) is a search tool that uses another search engine's data to produce its own results from the Internet. Metasearch engines take input from a user and simultaneously send out queries to third party search engines for results. Sufficient data is gathered, formatted by their ranks and presented to the users. Metasearch engines have their own sets of unique problems. All of the websites stored on search engines are different, which draws irrelevant content. Problems such as spamming reduces result accuracy. The process of fusion aims to tackle this issue and improve the engineering of a metasearch engine. There are many types of metasearch engines available to allow users to access specialized information in a particular field. The first person to incorporate the idea of meta littling was Colorado State University's Daniel Dreilinger. He revealed SearchSavvy, which let users search up to 20 different search engines and directories at once. Although fast, the search engine was restricted to simple searches and thus wasn't too reliable. University of Washington student Eric Selberg released a more 'updated' version called MetaCrawler. This search engine improved on SearchSavvy's accuracy by adding its own search syntax behind the scenes, and matching the syntax to that of the search engines it was probing. Metacrawler reduced the amount of search engines queried to 6, but although it produced more accurate results, it still wasn't considered as accurate as searching a query in an individual engine. Another metasearch engine was created in May 20, 1996. HotBot, owned by Wired at the time, was a search engine with search results coming from the Inktomi and Direct Hit database. It was known at the time for its fast results and funky name, and as a search engine with the ability to search within search results. Upon being bought by Lycos in 1998, development for the search engine staggered and its market share fell drastically. After going through a few alterations, HotBot was redesigned into a simplified search interface, with its features being incorporated into Lycos' website redesign. A metasearch engine called Anvish was developed by B. Shu and Subhash Kak in 1999; the search results were sorted using instantaneously trained neural networks. This was later incorporated into another metasearch engine called Solosearch. Ixquick is a search engine more recently known for its privacy policy statement. Developed and launched in 1998 by David Bodnick, it is currently owned by Surfboard Holding BV as of year 2000. On June 2006, Ixquick began to delete private details of its users following the same process with Scroogle. Ixquick's privacy policy includes no recording of users' IP addresses, no identifying cookies, no collection of personal data, and no sharing of personal data with third parties. It also uses a unique ranking system where a result is ranked by stars. The more stars in a result, the more search engines agreed on the result. In April 2005, Dogpile (owned and operated by InfoSpace, Inc. at the time) collaborated with researchers from 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. Results found that from 10,316 random user-defined queries from Google, Yahoo!, and Ask Jeeves, only 3.2 percent of first page search results were the same across those search engines for a given query. Another study later that year using 12,570 random user-defined queries from Google, Yahoo!, MSN Search, and Ask Jeeves found that only 1.1 percent of first page search results were the same across those search engines for a given query. By sending multiple queries to several other search engines this extends the search coverage 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. A metasearch engine has an advantage over a single search engine because more results can be retrieved with the same amount of exertion. It also reduces the work of users from having to individually type in searches from different engines to look for resources.