• SEO Scoop , Tuesday, November 27, 2007 1:18 PM

Metasearch engines have been around since the days of Webcrawler and AltaVista, but they haven't gained half as much traction as the core search engines. They barely (ever?) rank in comScore, Hitwise or Nielsen Online results, and aren't often the focus of a Webmaster's attention when it comes to SEO. But these engines still exist because their premise of saving searchers time by returning blended results and stripping out the duplicates is excellent.

"DazzlinDonna" Fontenot's review of a dozen metasearch engines contains a screenshot and snippets of info from the "About" page of each one -- as well as Fontenot's quick and dirty impression of each engine's merits and flaws.

Staples like Dogpile, Excite and Mamma are on the list, but for Fontenot they score low marks for their "ho-hum" interfaces and "typical" value propositions. Meanwhile, newcomers like Clusty, Sproose and Myriad each have features that separate them from the pack.

Fontenot settles on Zuulu as the best and most SEO-friendly of the dozen -- noting that the engine's output is "fresh, clean and easy to read," and that the tabbed interface "makes life easier when comparing search engine results."

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