General
Search Online may not have a great name, but it is one of the best meta search engines around. It is relatively new, and works only with newer browser versions. It includes a number of unique features and is fairly advanced. It retrieves more results per engine that most other meta search engines do.
Search Sources
The default search may include AltaVista, Lycos, WiseNut, Yahoo, MSN, Direct Hit, AllTheWeb, Teoma, Northern Light and others; for some reason this list changes constantly. Unfortunately, the top two results are paid listings from FindWhat. Search Online includes many other sources (they say over 150), and many of them are invisible web ones. These sources are used when you choose an option other than "the web." Other options include multimedia and news. After performing a search there is a "news" link (small, at the top right) to news from Moreover organized in a folder-tree. Every search will give you a quick summary of how it when, and you can see more details (ie how many from each source) by clicking on "report."
Features
By default, Search Online clusters results by site, showing only the first result, and the rest appear when you click on the +, although site clustering can be turned off. Few other meta search engines use site clustering. Even more uniquely, Search Online enables you to change the weighting of various elements in the ranking algorithm. In other words, you can choose to make titles, or URLs more important. Every result has a checkbox beside it, and you can use this to email selected results to anyone (as long as you register, which is free). Search Online also includes a spell checker.
Search Help
The front page gives you the options of "and," "or," "phrase," etc, and "boolean." With boolean you can use OR, AND, AND NOT, nesting with brackets, and other syntax as specified here. Note that a space is required after a minus sign unlike other most search tools. As with all meta search engines, it is probably best not to use very complex search syntax.

This page was last updated on March 30, 2002. Submit changes here.