Metasearch Engine Reviews: MetaCrawler and Inference Find + Boolean Basics: AND and OR Operators

MetaCrawler (http://www.metacrawler.com) delivers an impressive combination of user-friendliness, speed and informative search results. In contrast to most metasearch engines, it also offers a broad array of special features (e.g. classified ads, yellow pages, company information, etc.).

Search Menu: MetaCrawler's search menu is simple. You can require that any of your search words appear in the results, that all of the words appear, or that the words appear as a phrase. Boolean operators don't work well in MetaCrawler, but plus and minus signs to require or exclude terms seem to be effective.

The search menu gives you the option of searching the Web, computer products, newsgroups or files. On the Power Search page, you can restrict your results to individual continents, or to U.S. educational, commercial or governmental sites.

Results: Results are shown in order of the relevance scores assigned to them by individual search engines. Along with a description, each item contains the name of the search engine that it was derived from. MetaCrawler searches Alta Vista, Deja News, Excite, Infoseek, WebCrawler and Yahoo.

Eavesdropping On People's Searches

Are you interested in what other people search for on the Web? Go to MetaSpy. You'll see the terms or phrases being searched for by about 15 people at that particular moment. If you try the unfiltered MetaSpy, chances are that some scatological and sexual terms will be included.

MetaCrawler's design is easy to understand, and I've found that using this system is speedy and problem-free. It's an excellent first choice for a metasearch engine.

INFERENCE FIND PROVIDES A SNAPSHOT OF YOUR TOPIC ON THE INTERNET

Inference Find (http://www.inference.com/ifind/) is distinctive in the way it presents search results. Instead of the usual list of 10 to 20 items with descriptions (and an option to get the next page of items), Inference Find sorts your results into groups of related items, printing only the titles.

Depending on how many items your search yields, you can end up with a list of hundreds of the most relevant titles organized into many categories.

If several items are derived from a particular site, this site becomes a category, so that major sites about your subject are instantly visible. There are also general categories, such as commercial sites, educational institution sites, non-profit sites, European commercial sites, etc. Getting an organized list of all your results at one time can help you make an informed decision about which items are most important to explore.

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