May 21 2001.

The relaunch of the Profusion metasearch engine

Intelliseek has launched a new and improved version of its metasearch engine.

On metasearch engines

Metasearch engines are search engines that query several search services for you, and present a mix of the hits on the site's own result pages.

Given that the various search engines and directories cover different part of the Net and use different algorithms to decide the ranking of results, this may seem like a good idea. You get the best of all worlds in one go.

We won't argue with that. After all, Pandia has its own metasearch engine. There are limits to metasearching, though.

First of all, few metasearch engines will translate your query to the local syntax of the individual search engine. As long as you use simple queries, using search engine math (+ and -) at the most, it will normally work fine. Advanced Boolean searching, however, is normally out of the question.

Google and Northern Light, two of the best search engines on the Net, do not allow metasearch engines to query their sites. Hence these are excluded by any metasearch engine that follows the rules (although some Google results may slip by through results from Yahoo!, which provides additional data from Google).

Among the most popular metasearch engines are Dogpile and Metacrawler. There are also few newcomers that have received much praise and increasing popularity, including IxQuick and Profusion.

The new Profusion

Profusion is owned by Intelliseek, a privately held company based in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Profusion has now launched a new version of its metasearch site.

There are no longer any banner ads. Profusion has obviously decided that the click through frequency and fees have fallen so low that the banners are not worth the space they occupy.

There is advertising on the site, though -- even a metasearch engine has to earn a living. You will find paid results listed under the headline "search partners" near the top of the result pages.

The new Profusion has over 1000 sources divided into more than 200 "search groups". You can search hundreds of sites for targeted content such as jobs, MP3s, downloads and financial news -- all in one query.

Profusion lets you search more than 500 sources from the "Invisible Web", i.e. information that is not uploaded as traditional HTML webpages that can be indexed by search engines. The "invisible" information is delivered by online databases, and Profusion will search these for you.

The new Profusion tries to guess the context of the your search and "recommends" additional sources of information. In practice Profusion will suggest various searches targeting particular selections of search engines and directories, like "business news" and "tech discussions".

Profusion's Alerts feature enables you to track Web pages or search queries for updated information. Once your query or Web pages change, Profusion will notify you automatically by email and send you a complete report of changes.

There are also several other new features, such as printer friendly formatting of results and the ability to email results to friends, family and colleagues.

Search syntax

In the case of Web and other search groups, AND is the default search (i.e. "find the webpages that include all these words". You can also perform Boolean searches with AND, OR, and NOT and phrase searches with quotations (" ").

This is not the same as a complete support for Boolean searching, however, as more complex queries using brackets may not work on some search engines. Blame the search engines, not the metasearchers! Still, Profusion is actually one of the few search engines that will try to transfer or interpret queries containing parentheses.

If you want to omit certain Web search engine groups from a standard Web search, click on the "Fine Tune" link to the right of the main search box. Click the checkboxes to the left of the search engine groups you wish to unselect.

Click on any of the 21 so-called "vertical search groups" on the home page to target business, news, entertainment and other topics only. Each vertical group features pre-selected or default search engine groups.

To select additional search engine groups under a vertical search group, click the empty check boxes in front of the search engine groups you wish to search. Conversely, you can unselect default search engine groups by clicking their check boxes.

If you are looking for a simple metasearch engine that searches the major traditional search engines and directories, you can use any of the traditional services, Pandia Metasearch included. If, on the other hand, you want to target special groups of specialty search facilities, Profusion provides some powerful tools, indeed.

When running a service like this, you have to keep track of changes to the design of all the sites the metasearch engine query. A metasearch engine will fetch the relevant webpage, "rip out" the results and feed them to you.

If the search engine it queries changes its HTML coding or search form, this process may fail You may get no results even if the selected search site can deliver, or -- in the case of Profusion -- results where there in fact are none. It will give you a link pointing to a result page that contains no results.

This is not a common problem, though. If you find results like these, send Profusion a mail, and they will probably fix it.

You may want to spend some time exploring the various search groups and search instruments delivered by Profusion before you start searching in earnest. It is worth the effort, though.

Profusion
Pandia Metasearch (with links to other metasearch engines)

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