Pandia Awards 2004 Part 2

The best metasearch site

A metasearch engine is a search site that gathers listings from several search engines and directories and combines them into one list of results.

Normally metasearch engines will give pages that have a high ranking in several search engines a boost in the metasearch ranking. This makes sense, as many such high rankings may be considered a vote of confidence.

Given that the search engines and directories do not cover the exact same areas of the Web, metasearch engines may also give you a broader reach of the Net.

ixquick up front

There is actually, a large number of metasearch engines out there (see the list at the bottom of our metasearch page), but only a few of them bring real added value The design and coding is often bad, and the results are filled with pay per click text ads. There are some notable exceptions though, ixquick being one of them.

We like ixquick because it is simple and easy to understand. Each search result page presents alternative search engine queries that lets you focus your search. You may select which search engines ixquick should include in its results, and text ads are clearly marked as sponsored results.

ixquick is developed for professional researchers, and will normally translate boolean operators like AND, OR, and NOT for search engines that support advanced searching. it will not forward such queries to engines that so not understand such operators

Highly recommended

There are several other high quality metasearch engines out there, and whether you prefer one to the other is often a matter of taste. The Pandia Award winner of 2002, ez2www remains a very good and powerful search tool.

You may also want to look at Profusion and Vivisimo's new Clusty metasearch engine.

Pandia's own metasearch engine has, of course, not been considered for this award.

Go to page 3: The best sites on search engines