Five Colleges of Ohio Research Tutorial: Using the Web for Research 2

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Meta-Search Engines

MetaCrawler is a meta search engine. It does not maintain a unique database. Rather, it relies on the databases of other search engines. MetaCrawler sends your query to several Web search engines (such as AltaVista, HotBot, or Infoseek). Results are ranked according to how relevant they are to your search request, based on an algorithm that considers word frequency, proximity of search items and other factors.