The Meta Search Engines: A Web Searcher's Best Friends
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I know what you're thinking: Google gives you such accurate results that you don't need any other search tool. Well, let's see about that.
You might - or might not - know that no major search engine indexes ALL the existing Web pages. OpenFind states that it indexes 3.5 billion Web pages, Google claims 2.4 billion, AlltheWeb - 2.1 billion, Inktomi - a little more than 2 billion, WiseNut - 1.5 billion and AltaVista - 1 billion Web pages.
The truth is, nobody knows how wide the Web is. Some say 5 billion pages, some 8 billion, some even more. Anyway, what's definite is that the major search engines (SEs) index only a fraction of the "publicly indexable Web". Moreover, every SE indexes different Web pages, which means if you use only one SE you will miss relevant results that can be found in other search engines.
One way to more effectively search the Web is to use a meta search engine.
What Is A Meta Search Engine?
A meta search engine (also know as multi-threaded engine) is a search tool that sends your query simultaneously to several search engines (SEs), Web directories (WDs) and sometimes to the so-called Invisible (Deep) Web, a collection of online information not indexed by traditional search engines.
After collecting the results, the meta search engine (MSE) will remove the duplicate links and, according to its algorithm, combine/rank the results into a single merged list.
An important note:
Unlike the individual search engines and directories, the meta search engines
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