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We are about to uncover the whole truth about meta search engines. But first, what do you intend to get when you type a term in the search box of a search engine?
Relevant content in a detailed yet straightforward form!
This is precisely what search engines deliver as results. There are millions of information uploaded to the internet on a daily basis, and you can access them—just like that—with a few taps on your keyboard.
You basically get access to content in the hierarchy of relevance. The best results rank first, and that is one more escape from analysis paralysis. Now, search engines have become a vital part of our existence.
Through the years, information assessment has been made accessible through search engine crawling, indexing, and ranking. However, there’s a particular class of search engines that have been around for over some two decades—Meta search engines.
They are little-known, but what are they exactly?
Popular search engines, like Google, Yahoo or Bing, crawl billions of sites and create a directory for these websites. So, when a user searches a term, it checks its database and ranks the most relevant content as search results.
This is not the case with a meta search engine. It’s a search engine without a directory of its own and, therefore, relies on the data provided by several queried search engines to provide results.
It sends queries to various search engines, compiles, and index search results; and categorizes them based on proprietary search or result-ranking methods.
Basically, meta search engines are information aggregation tools that rely solely on the database of several other search engines.
Think of it this way:
A meta search engine uses the “two (or many) good heads are better than one” theory.
This is because it sends out search queries to several search engines and compiles the results.
If you type in a keyword or keyphrase in the search box of a meta search engine and hit search, the tool will send the request to multiple search engines, and its server will not display results until each queried search engine sends its results.
Meta search engines show results depending on their search result-display format. It can be based on search engine ratings or result content. They also prevent duplicate URLs from appearing in search results.
Some examples of meta search engines include:
SearchSavvy, the first meta search engine, was developed by Daniel Dreilinger of Colorado State University. It allowed users to query up to 20 different search engines and directories at a time.
Eric Selberg, a student at the University of Washington, and Oren Etzioni, his advisor, developed an advanced version in 1995 called MetaCrawler.
MetaCrawler was a narrower but advanced version of SearchSavvy. It includes its own search syntax, six search engines to query, and more accurate results than SearchSavvy.
Even though MetaCrawler gave more accurate search results, sending queries to individual search engines is still considered a better approach to improve accuracy.
Ixquick, owned by Surfboard Holding BV, was developed by David Bodnick in 1998. It maintains users’ privacy to a high level and ranks results by stars.
In 2005, researchers from both Pennsylvania State University and the University of Pittsburgh collaborated with Dogpile, a meta search tool owned by InfoSpace, to determine how important meta search engines were.
The results showed that over 10,000 user-defined search queries came from Google, Ask Jeeves, and Yahoo!, and only a 3.2% fraction of the first page results were similar for a specific search query.
Meta search engines can aid SEO research in several ways. You can find possible synonyms or phrase combinations for a particular keyword with ease. They help with keyword optimization since they can access a series of sites when querying a specific term.
So, Yes! Meta search engines provide a ton of keyword data for SEO. They have lots of SEO-enhance features such as:
You should find out where your customers are and optimize for it. Google takes around 86% of US search traffic. Therefore, channel your SEO efforts into producing quality content that Google will find relevant.
Google is the king of search queries, and it’s where you should focus your SEO tips. However, if around 86% percent of your website traffic comes from Google, put in 86% of your resources into Google SEO. Use the other 14% for meta search engines.
Why use one search engine when you can use many at once?
A meta search engine is like a know-it-all. It can access several search engines at once. A search engine, like Yahoo, will search its database for information on a query.
But a meta search engine, like Dogpile, will send this query out to multiple search engines (like Google, Bing, Yahoo) and accumulate more detailed/accurate resources from these major search engines.
A meta search engine is a useful tool for researching unknown topics. It gives a detailed yet straightforward answer about the search term. Conducting meta searches has several important benefits, and here are a few of them:
Meta search engines have been in existence for over 20 years but still have some shortcomings compared to big search bosses like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
A lot of times, two (or many) good heads might not be better than a genius one. Although meta search engines have several advantages, here are some of the disadvantages users have encountered in the cause of use:
Although meta search engines have some shortcomings, the benefits far outweigh them.
Although meta search engines are relevant, the big search bosses like Google, Bing, etc. prove to be more efficient search tools. Meta search engines can no longer compete against the big search industry, according to market research.
DuckDuckGo uses its web crawler, DuckDuckBot, and up to 400 other sources to compile its search results, including other search engines like Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex, and crowdsourcing sites like Wikipedia.
While not a true meta search engine, the growth of DuckDuckGo shows that there may be some hope for these engines against the big guns. It had huge growth in the last couple of years due to usage by customers who are interested in protecting their privacy online.
Despite the fact that Google takes an unchallengeable 90% market share, DuckDuckGo doubled its search volume, reaching up to million searches per day.
DuckDuckGo’s success and growth in 2019 can challenge other meta search engines to reach for greatness. On the flip side, there are alternative privacy options that guarantee a higher level of security-like VPNs. This choice can reduce meta searches.
Meta search engines are still in existence. They provide their users with many benefits-thorough search results, privacy maintenance, ease of use, and better pricing.
Although there are advanced search engines like Google dominating the search engine industry, every company has the chance to stand out if it puts excellent customer service up top. In doing so, meta search engines have a chance to thrive like DuckDuckGo is doing.
Whatever the future of meta search engines is, they are a significant part of web search history. As SEO is going nowhere, we’re sure to see more meta search engines in the future.
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