Provider: Erik Selberg and Oren Etzioni
Browsable index: No
Search capabilities: Yes
Item submission method: None
Editorial function: No
Annotated: Yes, from the page itself
Notable features: Verifies results when using "+"
or phrase searching.
FAQ: Yes, for the product, on the home page under "About."
Yes, for the search engine, on the home page under
"Examples."
With a single search request MetaCrawler searches nine search engines: Open Text, Lycos, WebCrawler, InfoSeek, Excite, Inktomi, Alta Vista, Yahoo, and Galaxy. It supports Boolean AND/OR and phrase searching. MetaCrawler will verify that each reference returned by the search is accessible and contains "valid data". To activate the verification feature, use phrase searching or place a "+" in front of a keyword. The verification feature is unique among "robot" type search engines.
MetaCrawler collects confidence scores from each of the search engines used, combines them, and provides the search results in order of relevance based on the combined confidence score. It does not, however, return individual confidence scores.
MetaCrawler allows the user to focus the search by geographic region and by Internet domain type, e.g. "com", "edu", etc. It also allows the user to specify time and relevance performance parameters. Note that when verification is done, searches can take 3 - 5 minutes to complete. However, the user may consider this time well spent since the references returned are always accessible.