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TEST DRIVE by Andrew Goodman - February 18, 2000
In the previous column, I
considered some features or issues that might be important in evaluating the
quality of a meta-search tool.
It's impossible to review them all, but based on the criteria
mentioned last time, here is a quick take on a couple of metasearch engines
which are hot, cool, or otherwise.
Still Hot: Metacrawler
Go2Net's flagship metasearch engine, Metacrawler, remains very
popular, and does a lot of little things right. The customization is nice, the
speed is good, and you can set longer timeouts if you want to make sure you
check slower-responding engines. Other little touches include:
- Country-specific search option: you can check as many of 27
countries as you would like to search, and results will only be returned from
those country-specific domains
- Related searches are suggested;
- any, all, or phrase search options clearly displayed;
- some additional bells and whistles like MP3 and auction
searches
- power searching allows you to specify the time you're willing
to wait for the search, and gives you the option to display results by
relevance (consolidated) or by search engine (in serial order)
The best feature of all, in my view, is the customization.
Many of us have a certain way we'd like to use a search engine time and again.
Wouldn't it be nice if the thing used cookies to remember which search engines
you like to search, whether you prefer to default to "any" or "all keywords,
what country domains you search, and various other default settings? Metacrawler
does this. We can hope for much more extensive use of these techniques from our
search engines in the future. Being able to customize your preferences is what
it's all about.
Another great feature is the ability to click on the search
results from just one of the engines, if you're interested in one set of results
in particular.
Every rose has its thorn. We're prompted to check out the "new
Metacrawler directory." You guessed it, dmoz
strikes again.
The development team at Metacrawler has thought of pretty much
everything. It's still a great meta-search tool.
Overall: 3 stars.
Cool: Ixquick
Recently, I stumbled across this metasearch site called Ixquick that no one's ever heard of.
Don't let the unassuming interface fool you: this one really works! The best
part, of course, is Ixquick's innovative results reporting format. A site only
gets rated by the number of times it appears in the top ten search engine
results for a given search term. So for example if a particular site turns
up in the top ten results for "Florida Marlins" on Excite, Google, and
dmoz, Ixquick assigns it three stars. Most meta-search engines do it
differently, assigning an aggregate score.
The star system seems to filter out the search engine spammers
in many cases. Excite in particular seems to have trouble with spam. But even if
someone is successful in exploiting the foibles in one search engine to get a
top ten ranking under a given search term, the site will only get one star
on Ixquick, likely keeping it out of your sight as you focus on consistent high
rankers with three, five, or seven stars.
You need to try it out to get a true feel for Ixquick's power.
This is why we're asking people to try our meta-search showdown.
Here we pit Traffick Metasearch (powered by Mamma, which is a Metacrawler-like
metasearcher, albeit not quite as good) against Ixquick and ask you to vote on
your preference. They behave quite differently in practice.
If you try it out, you'll quickly notice how relevant your
results are. Most of the time, anyway.
Ixquick's developer has made a point of
tailoring Ixquick to the habits of the search engines it queries. As a
consequence, Ixquick is particularly strong on phrase searching and Boolean
operators.
Overall: 2.5 stars
Getting Warmer: Mamma and Debriefing/Baldey
Mamma is one of the hundred or more metasearch tools which
fall into the category of "Metacrawler wannabes." Though clearly not as good as
Metacrawler, Mamma has an attractive interface, and is nearly as good. Some
people just like a cool name. And for some users, fewer customization options
may actually be preferable.
Debriefing is a
meta-search tool that evidently got popular due to the sheer novelty of
metasearch engines, a phenomenon I mentioned in the last article. It's always
been a high quality tool with a simple interface, but it lacks some
customization options. It's also the case that development of Debriefing may be
up in the air since it was acquired by Surfboard.nl, a leading portal company in the
Netherlands. Surfboard uses the Debriefing technology for its search component,
and according to company management, the technology is going to be licensed to
various European portal companies. Debriefing/Surboard, then, could very well
become important players in Europe. In particular, they may enjoy rapid
growth to satisfy the enormous demand for multilingual and multinational search
technologies. Metacrawler has already charged into this field, and Ixquick's
developer is also working on versions in different languages.
A slightly more customizable, but so far little-used, version
of Debriefing has been launched under the name Baldey. When I tried Baldey, it returned
results not unlike Metacrawler's. It seems that the vast majority of the traffic
for Debriefing and Baldey in the future, though, could be through various
portals which deploy their technology.
Overall (Both Mamma and the Debriefing
group): 2 stars
Dogpile
Dogpile is popular
with children and AOL users (I'm kidding!). To me, there's nothing you can do on
Dogpile that you can't do better with Go2Net's main metasearch tool,
Metacrawler. It does work quickly and efficiently, and looks OK.
Dogpile's results reporting format may be favored by some
users, but the majority of us don't prefer a "serial" reporting format,
preferring the consolidated results offered by most others. It should be
reiterated that Metacrawler can actually be set to return results in
consolidated or serial format. So Dogpile must have been acquired for
its large user base, in something of a defensive maneuver by Go2Net. Later on,
they can let users in on the fact that Metacrawler is far superior.
Since this is a family web site, rather than calling Dogpile
cool, hot, or otherwise, I'll leave the thermometer and Humidex readings to
your imagination.
Overall: 1.5
stars
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