How To Get The Best From Meta Search

Metasearch is a great way to search several search engines at once. It's effectively a way of querying the indexes of dozens of search engines. If you want to search Google, Yahoo, Live and Ask at the same time, then metasearch is the only viable option. However, not all searches are alike. There are terms you can use to get make your searches on a metasearch engine even more efficient. This means you will get better results. One way to do this is with search operators. Here's a guide to some of the main ones.

Searching With Quotes
One way to force a search engine to search for a phrase rather than individual words is to enclose the phrase in inverted commas. For example, as search for the words dog collars will return web pages with the word 'dog' and web pages with the word 'collars'. Think how many of those pages there are and you will realize that you need a way to tell the search engines what you really need. If you put the phrase 'dog collars' in inverted commas, then the search engine will search for the phrase rather than individual words.

Plus And Minus
The plus and minus signs are common math symbols, but they are also used with search engines. The plus sign shows that a particular term is required (for example dog+collar returns only results that have ). In contrast, the minus sign shows that a particular word or phrase should be excluded from the search (example: dog-collar)

Going Boolean
Some search engines also use Boolean operators, which narrow a search. The Boolean term AND narrows your search. It means that both or all of the terms linked by AND need to be included in the search results. (example: dog AND collar). In contrast, to broaden your search, you can use the Boolean operator OR (example: dog OR collar). This tells the search engine to search for either word. Finally, you can use the operator NOT to search for pages that contain one term but not another (example: dog NOT collar).

Combinations
You may also be able to combine some of the operators above to get an even more focused search. For example, you could search for "dog collar" NOT labrador, so that you didn't get any results about that particular breed of dog. You could search for "dog collar" +"Jack Russell" to find a site that offers dog collars for these small dogs.

How This Works With Metasearch
One issue for using operators with metasearch is that metasearch engines are searching other search engines, and all search engines have their own ways of using operators and querying their databases. This means that not all operators work with every metasearch engine and in some cases this can skew the results. However, there are other metasearch engines that use the accepted operators for each search engine they query, making the results you get totally reliable as long as the indexes are up to date.

Greg Aldrich created the Widow.com meta search engine in 1996 and continues to host and manage it today. Widow offers an alternative to the major search engines, searching multiple search engine indexes in parallel and displaying collated results based on relevancy. Widow also tracks the top searched keywords on the Internet.

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