Metacrawlers
Based on the maxim that more is better, Metacrawlers apply your search terms to several search engines simultaneously. Metacrawlers come in many forms and are sometimes described as meta search engines.
 |
Familiarise yourself with some of the popular metacrawlers which you can use in your information searching: Go to each metacrawler listed below and try out the search term british planes. Dogpile at http://www.dogpile.co.uk/ Surfwax at http://www.surfwax.com/ KartOO at http://www.kartoo.co.uk/ Mamma at http://www.mamma.com/ Note down what you find in the layout and types of information displayed. |
Again there are different results and some very different layouts.
One major reason for using metacrawlers rather than individual search engines is that you hope to get a good spread of the best information. We would suggest that this works best early in a search to get and idea of the breadth of the information available.
Using a metacrawler also saves you having to visit each of the individual search engines.
Let's have a look now at Web directories ...
