Fagan Finder >Meta Search Engines

About Meta Search Engines

Meta search engines, rather than use their own database, aggregate the results from a number of other search engines. While the aggregation is a useful feature, meta search engines can be both additive and subtractive. They often cannot include features that only some of their included search engines have, however they can add new features of their own on top of the aggregated results. I have written a longer article on the topic, Meta Search Engines, which includes more information.

Topic Clustering

Vivísimo and others listed under ‘Topic Clustered’ make topic clustering (grouping of search results into topics) their primary feature. A number of other meta search engines on this page also have this feature, however; check their descriptions by holding your mouse over their names. Query Server allows you to turn clustering off, so it can also be used as a standard meta search engine. You can also find out more about Topic Clustering.

Built on top of Others

While meta search engines can be additive in terms of features, so can other non-meta search engines. These are tools which take the results from just one search engine, and build features on top of them. Examples of these include Meceoo, built on top of Yahoo! Search, which allows you to build an exclusion and an inclusion list of websites, and the absolutely amazing FindForward, built on top of Google, which ads an uncountable number of features. UJIKO is another tool built by adding features on top of Yahoo! Search.