Meta-Search Engines

Remember when we told you that no one search engine indexes everything on the Web?

Meta-Search Engines send your search query out to multiple search engines at time, and show you a combined list of results. Since the problem with most web searches is too much rather than too little, in many situations a meta-search engine would just make the information overload worse. However when you're looking for something obscure, a meta-search engine could save a lot of time.

Beware, though: using a meta-search engines usually doesn't let you take advantage of many of the special search functions we've just reviewed.

Some of the meta-search engines currently recommended by SearchEngineWatch are:

• Dogpile (http://www.dogpile.com)
• Vivisimo (http://vivisimo.com/)
• Kartoo (http://www.kartoo.com)
• Mamma (http://www.mamma.com)
• SurfWax (http://www.surfwax.com)