[Metafind]
http://www.metafind.com/
Metafind
Metafind is the metasearch tool to use if you need to use
the more complex queries that it supports, want to get more than
100 hits, and can do without document summaries and abstracts.
Metafind, like Dogpile, accepts more complex queries than other
metasearch tools. There is an option to sort results by domain, a
capability not offered by other metasearch tools. (Metacrawler can
filter on domain, which is not the same thing.) Going against six
search engines, Metafind regularly returns a list of about 175
items sorted so you can identify duplicates. All it returns is the
title and URL - no summaries or abstracts - so you may have to
spend a fair amount of time fetching and looking at documents that
you could have skipped if you had the document summary returned by
other metasearch tools. Metafind and its companion Dogpile are new
resources, both developed by the same person who has established a
new company and is looking for commercial support. The future
prospects of this resource should be considered uncertain.
Search Engines
AltaVista, Excite, HotBot, Infoseek, OpenText and Webcrawler.
Metafind retrieves 10 links from AltaVista twice, 10 from Excite
twice, 50 from HotBot, 25 from Infoseek, 10 from OpenText and 50
from Webcrawler.
Speed
Quite fast. Results are typically returned in about 30 seconds.
Query options
Metafind accepts Boolean queries and translates them for each
search engine that is accessed. If you just type a list of words,
Metafind treats it as if the words were joined by AND, equivalent
to searching for all the words. The Boolean terms you can use are:
AND, OR, NOT, NEAR. You can also use quotes to delimit phrases as
in "search tips". Parentheses can be used to group terms. Metafind
points out that some of the engines will ignore the parentheses. A
moderately complex query: "search tips" hints NOT database is
interpreted properly and translated accurately for all the engines
on the list.
Results
Metafind combines the results from each search engine into a
single list, eliminating duplicates and noting which search engine
or engines detected each item in the list.
Sort options:
Sort by keyword (default) - alphabetically by keyword found in
title or URL
Do not sort - not clear why you would want this option
Sort alphabetically - probably the most useful choice
Sort by domain - could be useful looking for foreign or regional
information - try it!
Wait option
This option tells Metafind how long to wait for each engine to
return results. The default is 40 seconds and results are almost
always available quicker than that. |
