Metacrawler...?

[creative craig]

Does anyone have any experience with Metacrawler?

I understand that they search multiple SE's, just wondering if they are reliable or not.

Craig :)

[Brad]

They are owned by Infospace, who also owns Excite.

Webcrawler was one of the first metasearch engines and they have updated their technology over the years.

Reliable? Do you mean for searches or for advertising?

[creative craig]

For searchs, is it a good tool to see how my sites are ranked across a few engines in one go?

Craig

[Brad]

I tend to like Vivisimo and ixquick better. Frankly there has been so many changes in the search engines and the metasearch engines I now just go straight to the different engines proper to check.

[lorax]

I've used metacrawler alot in the past. Have since ditched it in favor of Google exclusively. It never seemed to cast it's net wide enough for my liking. For what it's worth.

GB

[kmarcus]

brad - webcrawler was one of the first *spider based* engines, not meta search engines.

lorax - metacrawler also searches google.

[jeremy goodrich]

Thanks, kmarcus. It's easy to forget sometimes when engines are *that old*. :)

I'm not too into meta engines myself, I usually focus on Google, Wisenut sometimes, and Gigablast when I can remember.

Realiable, though, for checking sites rankings? Hmm...never thought of that. I usually just pour over my log files till they run together...gives me a quick sense of where a site is, how many Microsoft worms are spamming the server, etc.

If there was one meta that did that well, it might be handy, but since they (meta engines) usually clump in so many paid results, it gets really muddy real fast. There are scripts out there, I'm sure you could dump one on a box / combine it with the Google API deal so they are kosher with your plot, and make a meta of your own, for rank checking purposes. :)

Then you could even customize it.....exactly how you wanted.

[lorax]

metacrawler also searches google

I know but the result sets always seemed too sparse (as in lack of relevant info). It could be just the way I conduct my searches but I find Google much better suited to my style of research.

[creative craig]

It could be just the way I conduct my searches but I find Google much better suited to my style of research.

I suppose its all down to what you like yourself, myself I am a google man most of the time!

Craig :)

[kmarcus]

the 'by source' feature on metacrawler is kinda like a spiffy dogpile:

[search.metacrawler.com...]

this just pulsl the top ten or however many results from all the engines they go to which works well to see how you rank in those engines at least.

[Brad]

Thanks kmarcus. You are right. I miss-typed it.

[Robert Charlton]

>>Realiable, though, for checking sites rankings?<<

The problem with most meta engines is that they often time out before all the results are in, and usually there's no indication that this has happened. Also, most of them don't offer Google... probably can't afford it.

There's a relatively new engine, ez2www.com, that has been mentioned on the board before. It does offer Google, and it seems to solve the other problems too. It has a time-out pulldown menu that ranges from 1 to 60 seconds, and it offers a summary at the bottom with the status of each engine. Its engine choices are also almost just the ones you'd like to query: ATW, AV, Google, ODP, Teoma, Wisenut, Yahoo... no Inktomi, though.

I definitely use Google when I want to find something. Vivisimo is a good tool for researching themes and linking opportunities.

But meta-search engines are particularly great when I want to demonstrate something. I used to use Ixquick to show prospects how I could get high rankings across the board... They award a star for each top ten ranking, and then they rank you by the number of stars. ez2www also gives stars, but I haven't figured out what they correspond to yet... it's not exactly top 10 rankings, but it's close.

Even with the time-out pulldown, on very competitive searches with a lot of pages, ez2www also maxes out, even at 60-sec... just doesn't return all the results, but it sometimes says that it has.

PS to the above... There's also a thread on MetaCrawler news that I've made a correction to (we all mixed up MetaCrawler and WebCrawler) and kicked it up:

[webmasterworld.com...]