Meta Search Engines
A Metasearch engine provides one solution for this problem: a unified interface to multiple search services. Some provide a single
search form that, once you have composed your query, will submit it to several different search engines.
Others simply provide a list of different search engines and provide text fields with which to initiate a search for any specific engine.
Some examples of metasearch engines are:
Some examples of metasearch engines are:
Search engine targeting Strategy
A search engine targeting strategy can mean several things. First, what search engines will you be targeting? This includes targeting regional as well as major search engines. There are search engines besides Google, Yahoo!, and Bing.
If you are concerned about your presence overseas, there are many other search engines you need to worry about.
Big search engines also operate on several different search engine verticals[1]. Do not confuse search engine verticals with vertical search engines (which specialize in specific areas or data). The reference is to the Blended Search results shown on Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. These are additional avenues that you may want to explore.
Ad Search Engine Marketing
SEM strategy
Using PPC in parallel with SEO can be helpful. The benefits are multifold, especially if the site in question is brand new.
PPC can provide accurate forecasts for targeted keywords. For example, within the Google AdWords platform you can target the same
keywords in your ads that you are currently targeting on specific pages. You can then accurately forecast how your pages will convert for the same keywords once you start getting the equivalent SEO traffic.
You will have the opportunity to perform searches with metasearch engines in the next module. For now, take a quick look at the main page (or "home page") of startpage listed above. Note which, if any, allow you to choose the group of search engines and/or directories that will be searched before you begin the search. Also note other options that you can set to control your search. Clicking on any of these links will open the Web site in a separate browser window, so you can switch between this lesson and the Web site.
Meta search
Meta search engines are search engines that aggregate results from multiple search engines and present them to the user.
The best-known meta-search engine is Dogpile.com.
However, its search volume is quite small, and these do not factor into SEO strategies.
More specialized vertical search engines
Vertical search can also come from third parties. Here are some examples:- Comparison shopping engines, such as PriceGrabber, Shopzilla, and NexTag
- Travel search engines, such as Expedia, Travelocity, Kayak, and Uptake
- Real estate search engines, such as Trulia and Zillow
- People search engines, such as Spock and Wink
- Job search engines, such as Indeed, CareerBuilder, and SimplyHired
- Music search engines, such as iTunes Music Store
- B2B search engines, such as Business.com, KnowledgeStorm, Kellysearch, and ThomasNet
Meta Search Engines
If you search for an identical term on various spider-based search engines, chances are
you will get different search engine results. The basic premise of meta search engines is to aggregate these search results from many different crawler-based search engines, thereby improving the quality of the search results.
The other benefit is that web users need to visit only one meta search engine instead of
multiple spider-based search engines. Meta search engines will save you time in getting to the search engine results you need.
As shown in Figure 2-3, a meta-search engine compiles its results from several sources, including
Google, Bing, and Ask.com. One thing to note about meta search engines is that aside from caching frequently used queries for performance purposes, they usually do not hold an index database of their own.
[1] Search engine verticals: Examples of different verticals include local search, image search, video search, product search and realtime search for news.
