A metasearch engine is a search tool that searches other search engines to gather data, producing its own results from the internet.
How does a metasearch engine work?
After taking input from a user, metasearch engines send out queries to other search engines for results. After gathering data from various search engines, a metasearch engine then ranks these data and finally presents them to the users.
Advantages of a metasearch engine
- Do thorough research from various sources
- Eliminates duplicate data
- Saves time
- Increases conversion rate
Disadvantages of a metasearch engine
- Issues like spamming prove as a hurdle in producing accurate and precise results
- Limited hyperlinks
- Difficult to limit searches
Examples
1. Skyscanner
Skyscanner is a metasearch engine or search aggregator that allows people to do travel-related searches including flights, hotels, and car hire. This metasearch engine is available in more than 30 languages, and over 100 million people use the website per month.
2. Kayak
Kayak metasearch engine provides services related to travel like flight booking, hotels, rental cars, and travel packages. This metasearch engine is available in more than 20 languages across 30 countries.
3. Ixquick
In 1998, David Bodnick created this metasearch engine in New York City, which initially provided metasearch for 14 search engines including news, images, and MP3 engines. In March 2026, Ixquick.com was merged into Startpage.com. Startpage was started as a web directory in 2002.
4. MetaCrawler
MetaCrawler is a search engine that was originally launched as a metasearch engine in July 1995. It gathered data from various sources like Google, Yahoo!, Bing (formerly Live Search), Ask.com, About.com, MIVA, and LookSmart. After multiple mergers, MetaCrawler was finally relaunched as its own search engine in 2017.
5. Dogpile
This metasearch engine was created by Aaron Flin in November 1996. Dogpile provides results from various search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Yandex, and Bing. Initially compared with MetaCrawler, Dogpile is considered more advanced than Metacrawler. Some of the features of this metasearch engine include “recent searches”and “search suggestions.”
6. MetaGer
This is a Germany-based metasearch engine that mainly focuses on protecting users’ privacy. Built on 4 small-scale web crawlers, MetaGer gathers data from more than 50 search engines. This metasearch engine allows the users to choose a specific search engine for their queries. The users can also make their personal blacklists to screen out websites.
7. Sputtr
This metasearch engine is very fast and easy. This search engine is almost completely customizable. After registering as a user, you can customize the homepage and see everything that you search.
8. Draze
This metasearch engine claims to be a family-friendly search engine as they don’t give the option to change the settings and allows all results to be displayed. For example, minors can change the settings on other search engines to register by entering fake age; however, Draze doesn’t give this option. Draze also filters out over 99% of the adult-oriented websites from its results.
9. Yippy
Yippy is a metasearch engine that is known for grouping searched results into clusters. Yippy uses filetype, Boolean operators, and language-restricted search.
10. DuckDuckGo
This metasearch engine gathers data from more than 400 sources including Bing, Yahoo, and Wikipedia. DuckDuckGo claims to protect the online privacy of the users.
11. Vroosh
This metasearch engine acts as both a meta crawler and web crawler; it utilizes fast parallel technology for speed and accuracy. This metasearch engine allows the users to search in any language.
12. Qksearch
This metasearch engine allows the users to search in three different ways – cluster search, blended search, and split search.
13. Info
Launched in October 2004, this metasearch engine gathers data from various search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Ask, Bing, Yandex, and Open Directory. The users can search for images, tickets, videos, maps, weather, hotels, news, flights, health, and more.
14. BoardReader
This metasearch engine allows users to search online messages and bulletin boards, discussion forums, and other social media.
15. FindSounds
FindSounds is a metasearch engine that allows users to search sound effects and musical instrument samples either for commercial use or personal use.