Dogpile, MetaFind and ProFusion are effective metasearch engines with differing strengths and weaknesses. The right engine for your search depends on your subject and the type of results you're looking for.
DOGPILE - IT'S THOROUGHNESS CAN'T BE BEAT
Dogpile is amazingly comprehensive. For general web searches, it accesses Yahoo, Lycos A2Z, Excite Guide, GoTo.com, PlanetSearch, Thunderstone, What U Seek, Magellan, Lycos, WebCrawler, Infoseek, Excite, and Alta Vista.
Reference.COM, Deja News (including its archival files) and Alta Vista are queried for newsgroup searches, and Filez and FAST FTP Search are accessed for FTP file searches.
In addition, Dogpile searches 25 business news wires and 3 collections of news wires. Stock quotes and weather forecasts are offered as special features.
Search Engine Choices: You can choose the order in which Dogpile accesses search engines in its Custom Search feature. You can also opt to skip any engines that you don't want Dogpile to search.
Search Tips
Dogpile accepts quotation marks to indicate phrases, as well as the Boolean operators AND, OR , NOT and NEAR. Search statements are translated into a form that's acceptable to search engines not supporting Boolean operators.
For example, the search statement "pumpkin pie" AND recipe would be translated to +"pumpkin pie" +recipe in Infoseek.
Results Grouped by Search Engine
Dogpile gives you complete information about the outcome of your search in each search engine. It's ideal if you like to resume your searches in the engine yielding the best results.
Items retrieved from each search engine are presented together. At the start of the results list from each engine, the number of items found by that engine is displayed. In addition, your query (in the form presented by Dogpile) is shown.
Dogpile accesses three search engines at a time. After it provides you with results from the first three, it tells you how many search engines remain to be searched, and asks you if you want to continue.
Results are presented in the original search engine's format. In some cases this includes special services such as MetaCrawler's Similar Pages or Alta Vista's Translate.
