A decade ago, you’d have been crazy to use any search engine but Yahoo!. A few years ago, everyone in the know used Google. Today, though, there are so many successful search engines online that it is tough to tell which one performs best. Rather than using a search engine just because it happens to have the best advertising campaigns, it makes sense to use a service that can pull the resources of hundreds of search engines into one compact page of results.
How Search Engines Work
Search engines locate relevant pages by scouring the Internet for keywords that match the user’s query. If, for example, you want to find information about the band U2, then the search engine would look for every instance of the keyword “U2” online.
There are, of course, thousands upon thousands of sites about this band. That’s where page ranking comes in. Search engines rank pages based on several factors, including how much traffic they get and how many incoming links they have. This helps the search engine give you the most relevant sites first while hiding the irrelevant ones deep into the Internet’s recesses.
Getting Meta with Search Engines
Individual search engines work well on their own, but what if you could harness the power of multiple engines to give you the absolute most relevant data for your query? What if you could get meta with search engines by taking the results of popular options such as Yahoo!, Bing, and Google, then deciding which pages are really the most important based on a wider range of results? If Google, Bing, and Yahoo! all agree that one site is best, then the meta search engine would give that to you. If there were disagreements, then the meta engine would rank the pages according to a consensus. The result: better information for Internet users that don’t have a lot of time to waste looking for the pages that they need.