Ixquick is a powerful, easy-to-use metasearch engine that is effective for both research and general searches. It accesses 14 search engines and directories (AOL.com Search, Alta Vista, Direct Hit, Excite, FAST, GoTo, Infoseek, Live Directory, Lycos, MSN, Open Directory, Snap, WebCrawler and Yahoo), and returns only the top ten results from all of them - minus the duplicates.
This concept seems to be successful - the results of my searches were often exceptionally relevant. When you visit a resulting site or the engine the site was retrieved from (which includes the search results), it opens in a separate window. This can save a lot of time.
Results: Each resulting site is preceded by one or more stars which indicate how many search engines included the item in its top ten results. The names of these engines and rank of the site within them are given after the item's URL. Each item also includes the title, and a description.
Specialized Searches: Ixquick offers two specialized metasearches - News and MP3. Engines accessed in the news search are Associated Press, CNN, Los Angeles Times, Reuters, San Francisco Chronicle and the Washington Post. For the MP3 searches, 2Look4.com, AstraWeb, MP3, Lycos MP3.com, and Oth.net MP3 are queried. Both of these specialized metasearches also return the top ten results in each engine and use the same results format.
Search Tips: Most metasearch engines recommend doing very simple searches in order not to get irrelevant results, but Ixquick allows a wide variety of search operators. It can do this because its search system remembers the operators that each engine accepts and only submits your search to those engines. Of course, the more operators you use, the fewer engines your search will be submitted to.
Search operators available include the plus and minus signs to require or forbid a word, quotation marks to enclose a phrase, the asterisk as a wildcard character (for truncation or word stemming), and the Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT and NEAR (including parentheses for complex searches).
In addition, eight "fields" are available, for example title: to search for words in web page titles (e.g., title:poodle) and image: to search for websites with a particular image (e.g., image:flower). Or you can search using natural language.
SherlockHound - EFFECTIVE GENERAL AND SPECIALIZED METASEARCHES
SherlockHound is a competent metasearch engine with some valuable special features. The general web metasearch accesses AOL.com Search, Direct Hit, Excite, Lycos, MSN, Netscape Search, and Yahoo, producing results that are often above average in relevance. It appears to be aimed mainly at the general searcher although its specialized metasearches may also be useful to the researcher.
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