Metasearch Engines

Metasearch engines take search terms and process them through several search engines at the same time. Although efficient in some ways, it actually conceals several potential weaknesses.

Metasearch engines revise searches into the simplest format. They may or may not tell users the exact search term sent to a search engine.
They return only a given number of results from any search engine. Users can change the number, but may not realize it or why it might be useful to do so.
Metasearch engines do not search in the best places. Most do not offer direct search of Google for example, instead searching some of the weakest, least academic search engines. While users can occasionally set search engine choices, they have to know how to do so.

General Conclusion: Not Recommended, except when used with Extreme Caution.

A short list of metasearch engines.

Clusty		Recommended. Clusty allows you to select which search engines you wish to use, being the only meta-engine to do so. Its greatest weakness lies in the poor selection of search engines users have to choose among. The strongest entries are MSN and Ask. Neither Google nor Yahoo are included. Clusty's special feature is its clustering technology, which groups results into categories.
Surfwax		Recommended. Surfwax's big feature is what it calls its SiteSnap technology. This lets you click on a magnifying glass icon to get a selection of highlighted information from the page to check for relevance without having to go to the page itself. It also lets you click on another icon to bring up a list of "focus" terms to select a way to further narrow your search with a mouse click. Although Google is not included in the search results, Yahoo is. The focussing features and Sitesnap technology can make this an impressive tool.
Dogpile		Recommended. Dogpile has a simple its interface, and alone of the metasearch engines provides access to Google's results. It also maintains a history of your recent searches, so you can easily rerun a particular search.

Hybrid Search Engines

Jux2	offers users an opportunity to compare the results of three big players in search: Google, Yahoo, and Live Search. After users select a favorite search engine, it provides tabs that let them see what results were "left out" of their preferred choice, what only it found, what the best of all 3 were (the ones that are shown first), and finally the exact results of their chosen search engine (including both those that overlapped other search engines and those that did not).
Proteus	lets users search major search engines in turn, either in the same window or in a new window. But it also provides access to several smaller specialized search engines, such as AskEric and Biography.com. It also includes various options to refine searching syntax.
Queryster	allows users to run a single search through a series of search engines, showing the results in a framed window and carrying the Queryster controlling search links in the exterior frame so that it easy to switch to a new engine for different results. Potentially a great tool, Queryster has had some problems with locking up in its frame structure.

If you'd like to know more, check out these sites:

Search Engine Showdown Reviews — Greg R. Notess' careful analyses of the constantly changing world search engines.

Search Engine Watch — Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman's website devoted to the the ongoing analysis of search engines. These two sites are the place to check for up-to-date information on search technology.

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