This post was written by guest blogger Alex Stetson, a Boston SEO specialist.
Multi-search engines deliver results from a number of different search engines at once; this is meant to streamline the manual search process that users normally follow. So what do certain multi-search engines have to offer both the SEO and the common internet searcher? What are the positives and negatives of each? Keep reading for the multi-search engine low-down.
Monster Crawler
Monster Crawler is a multi-search engine that pulls results from Google, Yahoo, and Bing all in one click. This tool uses InfoSpace metasearch technology to return a comprehensive list of results gathered from three search engines.
The Advantage? If you are a consumer, Monster Crawler makes your search process more all-inclusive and faster; it also brings up more commercial listings for more commercial-based keywords, and organic listings for general search terms. In this sense, it caters results to what you are looking for.
The Drawback? Users can’t differentiate which results came from which search engine, so it’s not a great tool for rank checking purposes; the user can’t tell how a site ranks on a particular SERP. Also, the organic vs. commercial listings are indistinguishable, since the two are jumbled together in one results page.
Dogpile
Another multi-search engine using metasearch technology, Dogpile pulls results from four databases: Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask. Dogpile is highly customizable, allowing users to sort results categorically (by image, video, news, yellow pages, and/or white pages.)
The Advantage? Dogpile includes more data in results (since it draws from four search engines,) without sacrificing relevancy. This is because there is an advanced search feature built in to yield even more tailored results.
The Drawback? The Dogpile SERP tells you which search engine each result is derived from and whether or not it is a commercial link; however, it’s difficult to ascertain how rankings vary on different SERP’s.
Bjorgul
Bjorgul is a multi-search portal. This differs from a multi search engine because it provides a number of search boxes on the homepage, each one specific to an individual search engine. It is very comprehensive because it is a meta and major search engine portal.
The Advantage? It’s beneficial for SEO rank checking purposes because results are displayed in the exact order in which they appear on a particular engine’s results page; with results in their natural order, users can easily see and compare keyword page rank according to separate search engines.
The Downside? This type of multi-search portal is not all that much more efficient that the old fashioned method of manual rank checking.
And the Winner Is…
Search3
Search3 is the most effective multi-search engine tool for SEOs because it caters to rank checking purposes. Search cubed lets users specify results based on images or web content. The search results page is neatly organized into three columns that list the results as ordered in Bing, Yahoo, and Google. It’s easy to compare how a term is ranking on one SERP page compared to another without having more than one window open. This pleases the SEO and the plain old internet surfer because in both cases, it lets the user find what they are looking for faster and more efficiently.
