Untangling the tangled web (metacrawler.com)

Member Name: Diaz

Product:	metacrawler.com
Date:	05/12/00 (11 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Very comprehensive search results

Disadvantages: none

Metacrawler.com, as the name suggests is a meta search engine, any clearer?? In an ideal world you’d have plenty of time to quiz loads of search engines and you’d end up getting all sorts of results depending on things like ranking and whether or not the web master submitted or was accepted by the engine in question. Well a meta search engine searches other search engines so you don’t have to. Cool eh??

Metacrawler searches a dozen search engines and compiles them into one list and ranks them according to relevance. It also tells you which search engine it got the site from, handy if you want to delve deeper.

Metacrawler can be customised to
- Search specifically for image, MP3/Audio, Auction and Newsgroup items
- Select your own personal colour schemes
- Select which search engines to you want to use
- Filter can be set on specific domains, regions or countries
- Change the number of results delivered per page
- Set the number of results per search engine
- Time limits can be set to avoid long waits or to mine deeper
- View results by relevance, site (Commercial, Educational, General, Organisational, North American, and European) or source(much like dogpile.com)
And its all controlled by cookies so next time you visit you’re remembered.

It also has a Directory area with sections such as computing, entertainment, lifestyles, personal, shopping, sports, jobs and more.

There are also Popular searches, basically hot buttons, which go to set searches such as wireless, mortgage, shopping etc.

Resources includes access to White/Yellow pages, Maps classifieds Games etc.

And then there’s that good old income generator the Shopping area.

All in all I’d say using a metasearcher is a much more time efficient way to use the web. Metacrawler would be my choice.

Summary: