New Metasearch Engine Provides Cool Twist

Does the world need another metasearch engine? If it adds the groovy twist that METAEUREKA ( http://www.metaeureka.com/) provides, the answer is oh my my, oh heck yeah.

METAEUREKA has a 'tude. They promise no graphics on their pages, no news, and no weather reports. ("...if we need one we usually take a look out of the window.") They search AltaVista, Google, Lycos, Alltheweb, and Yahoo, and provide 10-20 results per search engine. All results are dumped on one big page.

Each search result offers the name of the page, the summary (though you can skip that if you like) and what search engines it appeared on. But the COOL thing is the "Site Info" link.

Click on that link (with JavaScript activated) and a little window pops up. That window gives you a bevy of information without even going to the site. Say I was doing a search on -- oh, I don't know -- sometimes it's hard coming up with examples -- the Idaho State Fair. But I want information on the upcoming Idaho State Fair, not state fairs of the past, so it's important to me to find a page that's been updated recently.

I do a search for "Idaho State Fair" and pick a likely candidate from the list of results. But instead of going straight to the page, I click on "Site Info." Up pops a little window that gives me the site's server information, the date on the server, the LAST TIME THE PAGE WAS UPDATED (very important!), and a variety of other information including (if available) title, author, keywords, and description. That information is retrieved in real time, so you have a much better idea of what the site's status is now than you'd get from the indexed page. Furthermore, if the page is gone you can find out from this popup window, since a 404 error will usually show itself in the page title as "404 error."

A nice idea. Worth a look.

Posted to Search Engines-Metasearch