Bot News
Metahoo!

By Brian Proffitt

There was, long ago, a time when every new page available on the Internet was posted once a week on the NCSA home page. Then twice a week. Then once a day. Then they gave up.

The explosion of the Internet has led people to find innovative solutions to get the information they need out of the billions of pages that are out there to be seen.

The most common (and thus far most effective) technique is the use of the search bot, which typically goes out and hunts information down and then marks it in a central database should someone want to query the information later.

Metahoo! is a search engine that does that too, only it does not send agents out to the Web sites--it send itself out to other search engines.

"Our meta search engine is fast, comprehensive, and ranks results by relevance and includes information about which search engine it came from. Websites results are from DirectHit, AllTheWeb, Webcrawler, GoTo, Altavista, Yahoo!, Netscape, Infoseek and About," explained Metahoo! Webmaster Tsan Trinh.

The Metahoo! site is nothing to write home about design wise, but then most search engines don't go for a lot of fluff. Besides the ubiquitous seach field, there is a selection of canned subject searches that cover a wide range of topics from astronomy to cooking.

"Metahoo! also meta searches for news, MP3s, jobs, auctions and forums," Tsan added.

I ran several test searches for specific items that I knew were on the Web but that some engines have had trouble locating. Metahoo! found eight out of ten of the items I was looking for, and ranked seven them fairly high in relavence. For people searches, there was less of a success rate: only two out of five searches came up with the results I expected.

Overall, I found Metahoo! to be pretty fast, as well. It is a tool you should consider adding to your search engine toolbox.