How Metasearch engines work

What is a search engine?

To understand what a meta search engine is, first you have to understand how a search engine works. The search engine visits billions of websites and creates a database or repository of sorts of the various sites. This is known as the index. Then whenever a user enters the search query, something magical happens and the pages that are deemed relevant to what you asked for are returned.

What is a metasearch engine?

Meta search engines are search engine tools that pass queries on to many other search engines and/or directories and then summarize all the results in one handy interface. (Example: A meta search engine is a search engine that uses more than one search engine to find what you're looking for).

How metasearch engine work?

Meta search engines don’t have a repository or index of their own; they take advantage of indices created by other search engines. In fact they present this as their strong point. A typical meta search engine pulls off the results from a number of search engines, say Google, Bing, and Ask, and then apply their own algorithms in some cases to re-order the results.

There are probably hundreds of them out there, some of the prominent ones are: Dogpile, Mamma and Kartoo.