Page:Untangling the Web.pdf/38

 Metasearch Sites

The growth in the number of search engines has led to the creation of "meta" search sites. These services allow you to invoke several or even many search engines simultaneously. These metasearchers may do a more thorough job of sifting through the net for your topic than any single search engine. If you are new to using search engines, these are a great way to do a very broad search, while familiarizing yourself with the popular engines and how they respond. But metasearch engines inevitably lack the flexibility of individual search tools.

It is important to note that many metasearch engines do not employ some of the best search engines, such as Google and Yahoo. Also, my biggest complaint about metasearch engines is that they perform shallow searches, usually only retrieving the top ten or so hits from a site, which is far too few to be comprehensive or truly representative of what is "out there."

However, metasearch engines do serve a purpose. If you are unsure if a term will be found anywhere on the web, try a metasearch engine first to "size" the problem: you may get zero hits with a dozen search engines (you've got a problem) or you may get a half-dozen right-on-the-money hits right off the bat.

Clusty Vivisimo, in my opinion the best free metasearch tool available, opened a new search site—Clusty—in 2004 and then made Clusty its search home in 2006. Fundamentally, Vivisimo and Clusty are the same, but Clusty adds options for news, image, Wikipedia, government, and blog searches.

The Vivisimo technology behind Clusty is unique because it employs its own clustering engine, software that organizes unstructured information into hierarchical folders. Clusty offers clustered results of web, news, and certain specialty searches. The Clusty default is to search the web using Live Search, Gigablast, Ask, Wikipedia, and the Open Directory.

Clusty is especially useful for searching ambiguous terms, such as cardinal, because it clusters them by logical categories, as shown below. 30