Dogpile Combines the Big Four

Meta-search engine Dogpile ( http://www.dogpile.com ) announced yesterday that it's now combining results from MSN Search, Google, Yahoo, and Ask Jeeves.

I like that combination of search engines, but these results creep me a little bit. I did a search for my standard test word (fred). The first result was for "Fred on eBay." Seemed a little unlikely, until I noticed that the result was "sponsored by".

So the sponsored stuff comes out on top, I thought. Fine. Except results 2, 4, and 6 are "organic" at this writing while results 3, 5, and 7 are sponsored. In other words, you can't just skip down a certain number of results and be assured of missing the sponsored results.

I can appreciate Dogpile wanting to include sponsored results for reasons of completeness. On the other hand I would greatly appreciate their more clearly marking the sponsored results. Even changing the "sponsored by" text from gray to bright green or blue would do the trick. As it is it's tough to notice a sponsored result.

In addition to Web search, Dogpile offers a bunch of other meta search including news, images, and audio.

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