26-08-2017, 11:35 AM
A meta-search engine (or aggregator) is a search tool that uses data from another search engine to produce its own Internet results. Meta-search engines take a user's input and simultaneously send queries to third-party search engines for results. Enough data is gathered, formatted by its rows and presented to users.
However Meta-search also has problems. Dozens of websites stored in search engines are different: this can draw on irrelevant documents. Other problems such as junk mail also significantly reduce search accuracy. The merger process aims to address this issue and improve the engineering of a meta-search engine.
There are many types of metasearch engines available to enable users to access specialized information in a particular field. These include the Savvysearch engine and the Metaseek engine.
History
"Why search the web with a search engine when you can search all or at least several?" This was the question addressed by researchers after a search engine review that found different search engines to produce different results due to the different algorithms on which each one is based.
The first person to incorporate the meta-search idea was Daniel Dreilinger of Colorado State University. It revealed SearchSavvy, which allows users to search for up to 20 different search engines and directories at a time. Although fast, the search engine was restricted to simple searches and therefore was not very reliable. Eric Selberg, a student at the University of Washington, released a more "updated" version called MetaCrawler. This search engine improved the accuracy of SearchSavvy by adding its own search syntax behind the scenes and adjusting the syntax to that of the search engines it was investigating. Metacrawler reduced the number of search engines consulted to 6, but although it produced more accurate results, it was still not considered as accurate as the search for a query on an individual engine.
Another metasearch engine was created on May 20, 1996. HotBot, owned by Wired at the time, was a search engine with search results from the Inktomi and Direct Hit database. It was known at the time of its quick results and funky name, and as a search engine with the ability to search the search results. When purchased by Lycos in 1998, the development of the search engine stumbled and its market share fell sharply. After going through some alterations, HotBot was redesigned into a simplified search interface, with its features incorporated into the redesign of the Lycos website.
Ixquick is a search engine most recently known for its privacy policy statement. Developed and launched in 1998 by David Bodnick, it is currently owned by Surfboard Holding BV from the year 2000. In June 2006, Ixquick began to remove private details from its users following the same process with Scroogle. Ixquick's privacy policy does not include registration of users' IP addresses, identification cookies, or collection of personal data, or share personal data with third parties. It also uses a unique rating system where a result is classified by stars. The more stars in a result, the more search engines agreed on the outcome.
In April 2005, Dogpile (owned and operated by InfoSpace, Inc. at that time) collaborated with researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania State University to measure the differences in overlap and ranking of major Web search engines with the Order to evaluate the benefits of using a Meta-search Engine to search the web. The results found that of 10,316 randomly defined user questions from Google, Yahoo! And Ask Jeeves, only 3.2 percent of the first page search results were the same in those search engines for a given query. Another study later that year using 12,570 user-defined random questions from Google, Yahoo, MSN Search and Ask Jeeves found that only 1.1% of first page search results were the same on search engines for A specific query.
However Meta-search also has problems. Dozens of websites stored in search engines are different: this can draw on irrelevant documents. Other problems such as junk mail also significantly reduce search accuracy. The merger process aims to address this issue and improve the engineering of a meta-search engine.
There are many types of metasearch engines available to enable users to access specialized information in a particular field. These include the Savvysearch engine and the Metaseek engine.
History
"Why search the web with a search engine when you can search all or at least several?" This was the question addressed by researchers after a search engine review that found different search engines to produce different results due to the different algorithms on which each one is based.
The first person to incorporate the meta-search idea was Daniel Dreilinger of Colorado State University. It revealed SearchSavvy, which allows users to search for up to 20 different search engines and directories at a time. Although fast, the search engine was restricted to simple searches and therefore was not very reliable. Eric Selberg, a student at the University of Washington, released a more "updated" version called MetaCrawler. This search engine improved the accuracy of SearchSavvy by adding its own search syntax behind the scenes and adjusting the syntax to that of the search engines it was investigating. Metacrawler reduced the number of search engines consulted to 6, but although it produced more accurate results, it was still not considered as accurate as the search for a query on an individual engine.
Another metasearch engine was created on May 20, 1996. HotBot, owned by Wired at the time, was a search engine with search results from the Inktomi and Direct Hit database. It was known at the time of its quick results and funky name, and as a search engine with the ability to search the search results. When purchased by Lycos in 1998, the development of the search engine stumbled and its market share fell sharply. After going through some alterations, HotBot was redesigned into a simplified search interface, with its features incorporated into the redesign of the Lycos website.
Ixquick is a search engine most recently known for its privacy policy statement. Developed and launched in 1998 by David Bodnick, it is currently owned by Surfboard Holding BV from the year 2000. In June 2006, Ixquick began to remove private details from its users following the same process with Scroogle. Ixquick's privacy policy does not include registration of users' IP addresses, identification cookies, or collection of personal data, or share personal data with third parties. It also uses a unique rating system where a result is classified by stars. The more stars in a result, the more search engines agreed on the outcome.
In April 2005, Dogpile (owned and operated by InfoSpace, Inc. at that time) collaborated with researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania State University to measure the differences in overlap and ranking of major Web search engines with the Order to evaluate the benefits of using a Meta-search Engine to search the web. The results found that of 10,316 randomly defined user questions from Google, Yahoo! And Ask Jeeves, only 3.2 percent of the first page search results were the same in those search engines for a given query. Another study later that year using 12,570 user-defined random questions from Google, Yahoo, MSN Search and Ask Jeeves found that only 1.1% of first page search results were the same on search engines for A specific query.