What is Metasearch?
It is no secret that the World Wide Web, which contains an ever-growing huge amount of dynamically changing information, has created search engines (SEs) to somehow organise this continuous flow of data. Unfortunately, none of these systems can cover all the endless resources of the Internet alone, and even the search algorithms for searching through already indexed documents differ significantly between different search engines. To solve this problem and expand the search capabilities by aggregating the search results of the best search engines, systems called metasearch engines have been created.
So, metasearch is a search engine that queries several independent traditional search engines in parallel and returns their results in one, unified list of results without duplicating links and, if possible, improving individual results, i.e., acting as an intermediary between you and many leading search engines.
Benefits of metasearch
A meta-search engine has the same advantages over a search engine as searching several directories over searching one
However, this does not mean that metasearch should be used in all cases. If there are a lot of documents on a topic, then metasearch is not necessary and may even be harmful, as it mixes different ranking logics. But if there are few documents on a topic, then metasearch can be useful precisely because it brings together a large number of search engines.
The main advantage is the ability to quickly and conveniently make a query to many leading search engines at once through a single search box, which saves time, and analysing a single listing of results is much easier than comparing many different listings with many duplicate results. In other words, working through metasearch, your angle of view will always be much wider than through each individual search engine.
Disadvantages of metasearch
The disadvantages of metasearch are a continuation and a logical consequence of its advantages: for example, it is obvious that metasearch does not have its own index database, so you cannot add URLs of your sites to its search. The second very important disadvantage of such search is the traditional very modest syntactic possibilities for formulating advanced search terms. Since a meta search engine can use up to 15-20 third-party search engines as donors, it is obvious that the syntax of advanced search (Boolean operations, etc.) will differ from one search engine to another. Although some advanced meta-search engines of the New School (see description below) try to translate such complex queries into the personal language of each individual search engine on the fly, it is still rare, and in general, support for various types of Boolean and other advanced operations is still very limited in meta-search.
Types of metasearch
The most standard type of metasearch is described in the definition at the beginning of this article, i.e. it is a search engine that provides a parallel query to a number of common search engines and then displays the results of these searches on one common page of the original metasearch. But apart from this type, there are other variants, in particular, variants when the query results are loaded in frames within one page, with each frame displaying the original page with the results of the targeted SE, and it is also possible to open several pages after the query with the original results of each connected SE. Another common option is to have a search form where you can access a huge number of search engines, but here you can only request one search engine of your choice at a time, these are the so-called all-in-one search pages.
