Metasearch Engines

Metasearch engines search the databases of several search engines at a time. Searching several search engine databases at a time may seem like a good idea but there are some problems.

• Often you can't choose which search engines are searched.
• They only return a fraction of the results from each engine.
• They don't take advantage of the search capabilities of the individual search engines (like phrase searching or Boolean connectors).
• Many metasearch engines omit Google, which is a highly-rated search engine with a large database.

clusty.com and dogpile.com are two of the most useful metasearch engines.