What is "metasearch engine"

n. (context Internet English) A system that displays aggregated results from several search engines, invoked simultaneously

A metasearch engine (or aggregator) is a search tool that uses another search engine's data to produce their own results from the Internet. Metasearch engines take input from a user and simultaneously send out queries to third party search engines for results. Sufficient data is gathered, formatted by their ranks and presented to the users. Information stored on the World Wide Web is constantly expanding, making it increasingly impossible for a single search engine to index the entire web for resources. A metasearch engine is a solution to overcome this limitation. By combining multiple results from different search engines, a metasearch engine is able to enhance the user’s experience for retrieving information, as less effort is required in order to access more materials. A metasearch engine is efficient, as it is capable of generating a large volume of data.

However, Metasearch also has issues. Scores of websites stored on search engines are all different: this can draw in irrelevant documents. Other problems such as spamming also significantly reduce the accuracy of the search. The process of fusion aims to tackle this issue and improve the engineering of a metasearch engine.

There are many types of metasearch engines available to allow users to access specialised information in a particular field. These include Savvysearch engine and Metaseek engine.