An example of a better-known metasearch tool is Dogpile (now owned by Go2Net). Perhaps you simply think of Dogpile as a "search engine," although it is quite different from real search engines such as Google, FAST Search (All the Web), Inktomi (MSN Search or iWon), AltaVista, and Northern Light. A real search engine creates an enormous searchable database by indexing the contents of hundreds of millions of Web pages. But a metasearch tool lacks its own database. Instead, it takes your search terms and sends them to each of several different search engines and directories, and then presents the results back to you in some sort of combined form.

One obvious advantage of using a metasearch tool is that it is faster to use a metasearch tool than for you to do the same search yourself in each of the various search engines and directories. Another advantage is that the metasearch tool is supposedly going to provide you with more results than you could get from any single search engine.

Let's now compare several popular metasearch tools, and see which of the larger search engines they use. Dogpile uses only AltaVista, plus a large number of directories and small search engines. As a result, it gives relatively disappointing results when compared with other metasearch tools. Some newer or lesser-known metasearch tools provide far more comprehensive results. These include Ixquick and Vivisimo. Ixquick and Vivisimo both combine results from both AltaVista and FAST Search. Vivisimo differs from Ixquick in that it clusters the results into categories, similar to the way in which the Northern Light search engine does.

I decided to put Dogpile, Ixquick, and Vivisimo to the test by searching for the name of one of my great-grandmother's brothers, Jesse Pitts Bodie. By way of comparison, here is how the most comprehensive individual search engines did with a search for the phrase "Jesse Pitts Bodie": FAST Search, 104 hits; Northern Light, 86 hits; Google, 21 hits; AltaVista, 6 hits; and MSN Search, 4 hits. Both FAST Search and Northern Light had a high number of hits because they had completely indexed my personal genealogical database. I should point out that if I had used a different search term, it is likely that Google would have produced better results than the other search engines.

Could the metasearch tools do any better? Dogpile gave only 4 relevant hits (for some reason it returned only 3 of the 6 hits from AltaVista). Ixquick displayed 16 unique hits from among 103 total. Ixquick does make use of FAST Search, so it appears that it chose to list only one of the many hits from my personal database. After eliminating duplicates, Vivisimo found 64 hits. Nearly all of these were from FAST Search, and apparently Vivisimo defaults to obtaining no more than 60 hits from FAST Search. When I changed Vivisimo's settings to search only in FAST Search, it obtained 103 different hits.

So, should you use metasearch tools? The results of this one unscientific sample suggests that several of the best metasearch tools do not appear to give you significantly more results than you could get from using a search engine by itself. However, metasearch tools do sometimes turn up a few unique hits from search engines and directories that you would not normally think to use. From an efficiency standpoint, I would recommend that you stick to using your favorite search engine (especially Google or FAST Search), but try a metasearch tool such as Ixquick or Vivisimo whenever you have been unable to find what you're looking for by any other means.

Drew Smith is an instructor with the School of Library and Information Science at the University of South Florida in Tampa. He is also a regular contributor to the quarterly journal Genealogical Computing, where he writes the "Cybrarian" column. He can be reached at drewsmith@aol.com.