Difference Between Search Engine And Meta Search Engine: What Is Meta Search Engines?

Difference between search engine and meta search engine is that meta generally don’t maintain their own infrastructure for exploration. They don’t search the web directly, but rather ask other search engines for search results pages and collect entirely different search results.

To get to know more about search and meta search engines and their differences, keep reading!

Difference Between Search Engine And Meta Search Engine: Defining Web Search Engines

A web search engine is a web tool that enables users to locate world wide web information.

Yahoo, Google, MSN, Bing are examples of popular search engines. The information that robots collect is used to create an index for web searches.

There are many browsers, such as Safara, Internet Explorer, and so on. A browser helps to access different websites and web pages. 

A search engine is also a program which searches for a particular document when entering specific keywords. The most popular search engines are Google and Yahoo.

What Is a Meta Search Engine?

You probably first need to understand how a traditional search engine operates before you offer a description of a metasearch engine. 

For example, a search engine, like Google, sends out robots, also commonly referred to as spiders. The robot will hop from one site to another before sufficient information is available to establish a record or database of the sites that it has visited. 

A metasearch engine, also known as an aggregator, is a search engine that submits queries to various search engines and aggregates the results into a main list or classifies the search engine results from which they originate. There are hundreds of web-based search engines and Dogpile is an excellent example.

Dogpile.com is one of the search engines with the most Meta use. Their results come from a collective aggregation of numerous search engines. 

Dogpile then applies a patented algorithm that shows researchers the data in the order they find necessary. 

In a realistic way, the search method is largely dependent on the user’s personal preferences and what he considers most valuable.

Meta Search Engines: Why Are They Important? 

After web search became popular, engines running above search engines have been an rising arena.

Most of the metasearch engines use main engine content: Yahoo, Google  and others often link to different web sources such as PicSearch, Flickr for image searching. 

In fact, DogPile was one of the first search engines to deliver keyword-oriented advertising, via keyword-oriented banners; before Yahoo Search Marketing or Google AdWords, which is a notable difference between search engine and meta search engine.

The question here is: are meta search engines of any interest today, while search seems to be a crowded market itself? What is the difference between search engine and meta search engine?

No search engine is completely flawless. While it is true that many questions can be answered in one or two succinct lines, it is necessary to investigate in-depth details on any topic from relevant sources, and research involves reference to several sources.

Essentially, a metasearch engine allows the user to insert several sources into a single query and field tests. The hope is that this volume of knowledge allows consumers to get the best responses as quickly as possible.

The fundamental advantage of using metasearch is quite clear: you get a lot more information than using a standard search engine.

Anyone who uses the Internet to learn will want the broadest and most complete picture. But, the difference between search engine and meta search engine is too long and confusing.

Search engines have a different index, another crawler, a different algorithm, etc. If you are searching on a single search engine, key information may be missing simply because that specific search engine does not rate it highly enough for you to note.

Engines with metasearch eliminate that risk.

Some Meta Search Engines Are Listed Below Along With Their Use:

Dogpile: When you want results from all big search engines compiled.

Ithaki: By using an internal algorithm, if you want to rate your aggregated results.

Polymeta: When you want a super-smart metasearch engine that can recognize colloquial language and organize your results using an algorithm.

SearchSalad: If you want a mix of results from the test engine and information from all of the big review websites.

Seekz: If you want a metasearch engine which will produce the most relevant results and eliminate all duplicates.