Metasearch Engine Reviews: InFind and Spidera.org

Unfortunately, these descriptions are somewhat difficult to read because they have small lettering, appear in a cramped space, and disappear after a few seconds. Hopefully, their appearance will be improved in the final version and the searcher will be able to control how long each description is visible.

Because of its subject organization of results, InFind beta is especially valuable in searches for information about general concepts (for example, fixed investments, atonal music, air travel safety). The way the items are listed makes it easy to find information about different aspects of a subject.

SPIDERA.ORG - SEARCHES FROM DIFFERENT VIEWPOINTS

Spidera.org is a useful metasearch engine with several convenient features. It accesses Yahoo, Open Directory (DMOZ), LookSmart, NBCi (links to Snap and Inktomi), AltaVista, AllTheWeb (FAST), Google, HotBotText, Excite and Go.com (link to Infoseek).

Next to the search box is a drop down menu, which offers several ways of limiting your search. You can restrict your search to directories, search engines, education domain (edu), government domain (gov), music sites (MP3), and web pages from Germany (de), France (fr), England (uk) and Czechoslovakia (cz). Spidera.org is fairly reliable in returning sites that lie within the various categories.

Search Tips

You can use the plus and minus signs to require or forbid search words, and quotation marks to require that the words appear in the order you specified. And you can search for web pages in a specific domain (e.g., literacy domain:org).

Results

In my experience, the relevance of results retrieved in Spidera.org ranges from very good to below average. One problem is that the results of a search are often derived from only two or three engines.

Links to the search engines that do not return any items are displayed at the end of the results list. When you click on any of these engines, you're presented with results of your search on that particular engine. Although you can get additional results in this way, it is time-consuming.

Results Format: Each item includes the title, a description, the url and the first initial of the engine it was derived from.

Spidera.org is particularly useful when you want to find information about a subject from several different perspectives. For example, in a search for information about the health effects of vitamin E, you could do separate searches for government and university-related information as well as for data from different countries.

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