Metasearch Engines

Ixquick is an example of a metasearch engine.
Ixquick page
Reproduced with permission from Ixquick.

Metasearch engines search the databases of several search engines simultaneously (e.g., HotBot, Excite, and Yahoo).

Most eliminate duplicate listings.

Usually, you have little control over search options.

smiley Best for an overview of your topic on the Web, seeing which search engines will produce the best results, and for simple searches.

frown Downside:
1. They aren't thorough.
2. You have no choice as to which search engines are searched.
3. Many metasearch engines omit Google, which is a highly-rated search engine
4. You cannot use phrase searching and boolean operators.
 5. They only retrieve a limited number of results from each search engine.

Other metasearch engines:
1. Dogpile searches Google, YahooSearch, Live Search, Ask.com, About, MIVA, and LookSmart.
2. Clusty searches Ask, Open Diectory, Gigablast, Live and others. It groups the results into clusters instead of a long list.
 3. Metacrawler searches Google, Yahoo, MSN Search and Ask
4. Surfwax.com searches OpenDirectory, hotbot, Yahoo, AllTheWeb, YahooNews, CNN, and MSN.
5. WebCrawler.com searches Google, Yahoo!, Windows Live, Ask and other popular search engines. WebCrawler's results include images, audio, video, news, and local information.
6. Kartoo.com presents its results on a map.
7. Mamma.com searches the following search engines and directories: Ask.com, Open Directory, Business.com, About.com, Gigablast, Wisenut, Entireweb, and Pay-Per-Click FindWhat and Kanoodle. Users have the option of searching all of them or select the ones they wish to include in their search.  
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