• by Shankar Gupta , May 12, 2005

Metasearch engine Dogpile today is expected to update its site, adding new features that allow users to compare results across the various search engines its algorithm crawls side-by-side, enabling a comparison of results across different engines.

Dogpile, which is owned by Bellevue, Wash.-based Infospace, Inc., gleans its results from a combination of top search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Ask Jeeves. Unlike most other search engines, Dogpile integrates its sponsored pay-per-click links into its searches, marking them with a "sponsored by" tag. Other major search engines separate sponsored links, placing them off to the side of the natural results. Brian Bowman, vice president of marketing and product management for Infospace, said Dogpile's algorithm is able to distinguish between searches done by browsers looking to buy something and those just looking for some information, and based on that, serves more or fewer sponsored links.

The comparison view allows users to select the results of a number of different search engines, and displays them side-by-side in a column view. Alternately, users can select Dogpile's combination of those engines.

Also with the release of the redesigned Dogpile site comes the "Missing Pieces" tool, a Flash application that provides a graphical representation of how the top 10 search results of Yahoo!, Google, and Ask Jeeves differ, and which of those results a search on Dogpile would serve.

To boost the release of its updated site, Dogpile also touted the release of a joint study from the University of Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania State University, showing that the top search engines return vastly different results for the same search terms. The study found that, on average, there is a 3 percent overlap between the results of searches performed on Yahoo!, Google, and Ask Jeeves.