If you haven't visited Dogpile in a while, you'll notice a change in its appearance. In 1999, it was taken over by Go2Net, who redesigned it and made some useful additions, while (to its credit) preserving the engine's basic features.
However . . . there is one important exception. There is now no way to see which engines Dogpile searches before you get your search results,unless you go to the (out-of-date) Help page. Formerly, the engines that were going to be accessed for each type of search (e.g., web, FTP, news, etc.) were listed.
Web Search: For its web search Dogpile accesses 12 engines - Google, AltaVista, LookSmart, GoTo.com, Dogpile Web Catalog, Dogpile Open Directory, FindWhat.com, Direct Hit, InfoSeek, RealNames, Lycos, and Yahoo! Although this is not a comprehensive selection of search engines, it is a good mix.
Specialized Metasearches: You can do six specialized metasearches on Dogpile - News, Business News, Usenet (Deja News, Alta Vista's Usenet Search, and Deja News' old database), FTP (only FTP Fastsearch at present), Audio/MP3 (GigaBeat, AstraWeb, AudioGalaxy and MP3Board) and Auctions (30 auctions). In addition, Dogpile offers searches of individual specialized engines covering several subjects (e.g., Weather, Yellow Pages, Stock Quotes).
Geographic Search: Dogpile's Geographic Search retrieves results from Internet sites within 20 miles of your preferred city. You can specify a city anywhere in the United States, and receive regional web search results, weather, yellow pages, white pages, maps and employment information without having to continually type the city in the search box.
If you decide to change the city you're focusing on, you can change your default or type in the new city and state, or the zip code immediately following your query. Separate the terms with commas (e.g., restaurants, new york, ny).
The web search in the Geographic search mode is not a metasearch, so if you're doing a concept search (e.g. "dog laws" "New York City"), you're better off using the metasearch engine.
Search Tips: You can use quotation marks to enclose a phrase.
Search Results: Search results in Dogpile are given in order of the search engine they were retrieved from. Results appear in the format of each engine. After receiving the results from three search engines, you're given the choice of receiving results from the next three.
