Metasearch Sites
A metasearch engine is a search engine that queries other search engines and then combines the results that are received. This can be very useful when you want a wide variety of results from many different sources. There are several metasearch engines available on the net, but two to take notice of are TagJag and Gnosh. TagJag, formerlly gada.be, was developed by Chris Pirillo and still stands out as one of the better metasearch engines. Gada.be/TagJag has been around since October of 2005, and now lets you search over 200 sources & subscribe to the search results via RSS - a very nice feature. TechCrunch was reporting TagJag’s site redesign a couple of months ago, but I haven’t seen it yet, which is too bad because it looked really cool.
Gnosh is also a metasearch engine, and pulls from both search and social sites, including Google, Del.icio.us, Flickr, Technorati, Yahoo, and more. I like the layout of the Gnosh results, making it very easy to access a category of results like "shop" results, "blog" results, "news" results, etc. Also, there is a short summary beneath each link.
On the other hand, there is still something to be said for the results in TagJag, too - you get A LOT of results all on page because each result is just a one-line link (no summaries). I think it comes down to personal preference. Do you have a favorite between the two or do you prefer another metasearch engine altogether?
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I should show you what we’re working on in the next rev.
Ever since my son told me about it, I’ve seen a groundswell of recommendations for Dogpile.com. And over the past few years, it has consistently remained the one search site I go to first and return to. It has changed quite a bit but it is still simply the best - easy to use and effective - fast and thorough.