Susanne has spent a whole day freshening up the Pandia Metasearch page.

Metasearch engines are, as many of our readers will know, search sites that merge results from several search engines and presents them within their own interface. The concept was very popular in the late 1990’s and the first few years of this decade as many found that their wide coverage gave better search results.

Metasearch engines may still be used to widen your search, as the databases of the big four search engines are not totally overlapping. Still, quality wise they are not better than the major search engines.

The great advantage of metasearch engines nowadays, however, is that they often provide very useful experiments in alternative ways of presenting search results. Clusty’s clustering technique is a good example of this.

Susanne has added quite a few sites to our list of metasearch engines, deleted a few dead ones (the life expectancy is often low in this line of business) an added links to relevant Pandia articles.

Weekend search engine roundup

Here are some of the search engine related articles we have found interesting during the last week:

• Spokeo

  Phil Bradley on a site that gathers details on all your friends from your various networks into one easy to find place. (Feb 20 2008)

• Text mining search engine SenseBot adds images

  SenseBot uses text mining of web pages of other search engines to generate a summary on the topic of user’s query. (AltSearchEngines Feb 20 2008)

• Bush - Tops For “Who Is A Failure” On Google

  For years, US President George W. Bush was tops on Google for searches on miserable failure until last year’s Googlebomb “fix” solved his problem on Google. But Bush is back (Search Engine Land Feb 21 2008)

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