You likely already know what a search engine is. Chances are you used one to find this blog post or to find Semrush.com because you wanted to conduct some SEO campaigns and keyword research. But have you ever heard of a metasearch engine?
Metasearch engines are a way to get a wide range of search results from different search engines. The theory is that you can get a wider breadth of answers and information to inform your decisions better.
Metasearch engines matter because you don’t just get all your information from one channel. We’ve seen from regular media outlets that one data source can be skewed, and you may not get a balanced point of view.
In simple terms, a metasearch engine takes the query you’ve entered and gathers results from multiple search engines online, such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, and more. They aggregate the results for you so you can choose the best information from the search results provided.
Some service-based industries such as airlines and hotel chains use a form of the metasearch engine. If you are searching for a hotel room in a city, you will likely find websites that will scour hotels in that city. The search engine will then return different results from searching specific hotel websites. You can sometimes even see the same hotel room for different prices at other websites due to your metasearch.
Metasearch engines are known for keeping a user’s privacy. Search engines such as Swisscows and Metager pride themselves on keeping your details private and out of the data-gobbling hands of search engines.
Metasearch engines are not new. The first person to conceptualize and create a metasearch engine was Daniel Dreilinger from Colorado State University. He developed SearchSavvy, which allowed users to search up to 20 search engines at a time.
Dogpile is one of the most well-used metasearch engines today. In 2005, the creators collaborated with Penn State University and the University of Pittsburgh researchers to measure data overlap from different search engine results. They discovered that only 1.1% of first-page search results were similar across engines such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Ask Jeeves, and more.
A search engine sends out queries to websites to see if the website’s content best matches the search query entered into the search engine. It returns with a results page, ranked from most relevant, according to algorithms.
