Dogpile search engine - meta search

Dogpile search engine has won the award for best meta search engine from Search Engine Watch.

Dogpile is probably the most popular meta search engines. It uses a customizable list of search engines, directories, and specialist sites as a basis for its search procedures. Individual results are displayed from each search engine. Dogpile won the Best Meta Search Engine award from Search Engine Watch in 2003, and was close runner up to Vivisimo in 2004.

For details of the meta search capabilities see:

Dogpile search engine - meta search 

The owner of Dogpile is InfoSpace, which owns four other meta search engines. The others are Metacrawler, Webcrawler and Excite. They all use the same technology, but each has a unique look and feel. Dogpile, the flagship, is designed for a general consumer audience.

The Dogpile interface has gone through many cosmetic and structural changes. The main aim was to streamline it and eliminate clutter, making it suitable for any class of user.

Each dogpile search engine result states which engine it was found on. This can be a good indicator of how useful the result might be. For instance, if it is found on all of the major engines it is might be more useful than a result found on only one engine. 

Sponsored listings are mixed in with the organic results, but they are clearly labelled (for instance, "found on ads buy Google"). InfoSpace has often been guilty of blurring the distinction between sponsored and natural search results. But Dogpile makes the difference clear, if you are reasonably observant. 

Dogpile used to only group results by source, now the default is to grouped them by relevance. But you can still sort results by source, if you wish. Simply click radio buttons at the top of result pages. This is a great way for website owners to quickly check if their pages are in the top ten for each engine.