metacrawler beta

Overture results included w/ relevant results

[rolfewinkler]

I didn't see any posts on this....

If you guys take a look at the newest version of Metacrawler, which can be accessed from the metacrawler home page, it appears to include paid links within relevant search results. For instance, a search for books returns a couple relevant results from Google mixed with more than a dozen "sponsored" results from Overture.

What threw me was that the search results, returned to me "by relevance," were primarily composed of "sponsored" URLs. I didn't study the page in depth, but I didn't see any explanation that explained why Overture results (along w/ Looksmart, FindWhat and Sprinks) are considered "relevant."

Naive me: I always thought "relevant" referred to results that were generated algorithmically.....

[Shak]

rolfewinkler

a PAID for Algorithm is normally better than an unpaid 1 (imo)

Shak

[rolfewinkler]

Oh I don't have a problem w/ the results per se, but I thought it was the industry standard to seperate sponsored results from non-sponsored results, a la Google, MSN or Yahoo......

[jeremy goodrich]

Excite has it all "blended" together, so it's hardly surprising to see another Meta engine do the same.

Seems that every formerly useful meta engine is now basically, "sponsored-links-r-us". Kind of sad, for those that used to use them as information tools, to get baraged with a virtual shopping mall.

Still, I guess it's an easy way to look up competition from a variety of sources if you're into PPC of any kind. :)

[AWillemsen]

Corporate sites that demonstrate federated search solutions often do not include paid results. For example, Query Server, Vivisimo and Solcara (very slow) just search major search engines (Vivisimo searches Overture, but this can be switched off in the Advanced Search page).