Mamma Search Engine

The mamma search engine, not to be confused with the momma search engine, is one of the most renowned meta search engines. 

The mamma search engine appeared on the web in 1996 and has experienced explosive growth since. It is estimated that there are about 5 million mamma searches per month.

• The mamma search engine, uses the results from pure spider databases and directories. It reformats the queries to fit each engine, eliminates duplicates, and displays according to relevance.

The Google, MSN and Yahoo databases tend to return very different results for the top places; there isn't much overlap in what they consider significant. This means Mamma is very effective in returning comprehensive search results from differing perspectives.

Mamma tends to produce a very large number of results, so your search needs to be very specific. Some meta-search engines are designed to be very quick, but Mamma is not one of them so you need some patience.

It is estimated that each variety of search engine spider only indexes between 0.5% and 30% of the Web pages available online. By combining results from multiple sources the pool of web pages is greatly increased.

Mamma.com history

Mamma.com was launched in 1996 by Herman Tumurcuoglu, who thereby gave the internet one of the web's first metasearch engines. He dubbed it "The Mother Of All Search Engines". Its head office is located in Montreal Canada. 

Through the rest of 1990s Mamma grew rapidly, largely through word of mouth. Income was achieved by selling banners to advertisers, and selling licenses to companies which wanted to use the technology on their websites. In December 1999, Intasys Corporation invested $25,000,000 and took 69% ownership of Mamma. A billboard appeared in New York's Times Square. Millions of New Yorkers could celebrate the Millennium in the benign presence of Mamma.

In 2000 Mamma began selling search result rankings, and advertised results were shuffled in with the metasearch results. Mamma's advertising campaign continued with TV commercials on CNNfn, MSNBC, and Bloomberg. The site received a considerable redesign, with advertisers' results appearing in the top two places under "Mamma recommends" (later renamed "Mamma Classifieds").

In April 2001 Tumurcuoglu resigned, followed closely by Intasys Corp buying out minority shareholders and taking 100% ownership of Mamma. In 2004, Intasys Corporation merged with Mamma.com to become Mamma.com Inc. 

It achieved an "honorable mention" position for Best Meta Search Engine in the 2003 Search Engine Watch awards, behind Dogpile and Vivisimo. The panel praised it for properly separating classified advertisements from search results, and adding nice query refinement links. It maintained this position in 2004.

In December 2005 Mamma.com acquired Copernic after a long struggle.

Copernic is a desktop searching tool for Windows. As well as searching the web from a PC desktop, Copernic searches files, emails, and email attachments on the PC's hard drive. It won the CNET Editors' Choice Award as well as the PC World World Class Award in 2005.

Copernic started in 1996 as a search appliance company. Copernic and Mamma.com first announced an intent to merge in late 2004. But a few months later, Mamma announced that the SEC had begun an inquiry into its stock trading activities. Copernic terminated the letter of intent to merge in May 2005. But the companies tried again. On December 22, 2005 Mamma.com completed its acquisition of Copernic.

Both the Mamma search engine and Copernic desktop search now live under the banner of  Mamma Media Solutions Inc.. Besides offering great search abilities, it is also a top provider of online marketing solutions to advertisers. For instance, it provides keyword and graphic ad placement on a large publisher network.