the portal's portal , Traffick, some time ago said it thought metacrawler was much better than dogpile....here is what they had to say
Metacrawler Does Go2Net Proud
TEST DRIVE by Andrew Goodman - February 18, 2000
In the previous column, I considered some features or issues that might be important in evaluating the quality of a meta-search tool.
It's impossible to review them all, but based on the criteria mentioned last time, here is a quick take on a couple of metasearch engines which are hot, cool, or otherwise.
Still Hot: Metacrawler
Go2Net's flagship metasearch engine, Metacrawler, remains very popular, and does a lot of little things right. The customization is nice, the speed is good, and you can set longer timeouts if you want to make sure you check slower-responding engines. Other little touches include:
* Country-specific search option: you can check as many of 27 countries as you would like to search, and results will only be returned from those country-specific domains
* Related searches are suggested;
* any, all, or phrase search options clearly displayed;
* some additional bells and whistles like MP3 and auction searches
* power searching allows you to specify the time you're willing to wait for the search, and gives you the option to display results by relevance (consolidated) or by search engine (in serial order)
The best feature of all, in my view, is the customization. Many of us have a certain way we'd like to use a search engine time and again. Wouldn't it be nice if the thing used cookies to remember which search engines you like to search, whether you prefer to default to "any" or "all keywords, what country domains you search, and various other default settings? Metacrawler does this. We can hope for much more extensive use of these techniques from our search engines in the future. Being able to customize your preferences is what it's all about.
Another great feature is the ability to click on the search results from just one of the engines, if you're interested in one set of results in particular.
Every rose has its thorn. We're prompted to check out the "new Metacrawler directory." You guessed it, dmoz strikes again.
The development team at Metacrawler has thought of pretty much everything. It's still a great meta-search tool.
Overall: 3 stars.
Dogpile
Dogpile is popular with children and AOL users (I'm kidding!). To me, there's nothing you can do on Dogpile that you can't do better with Go2Net's main metasearch tool, Metacrawler. It does work quickly and efficiently, and looks OK.
Dogpile's results reporting format may be favored by some users, but the majority of us don't prefer a "serial" reporting format, preferring the consolidated results offered by most others. It should be reiterated that Metacrawler can actually be set to return results in consolidated or serial format. So Dogpile must have been acquired for its large user base, in something of a defensive maneuver by Go2Net. Later on, they can let users in on the fact that Metacrawler is far superior.
Since this is a family web site, rather than calling Dogpile cool, hot, or otherwise, I'll leave the thermometer and Humidex readings to your imagination.
Overall: 1.5 stars
traffick.com
so if this is the case why are they putting dogpile as the search engine on infospace homepage, 100 hot homepage and hypermart instead of metacrawler??????.......well probably because of the 7.5 royalty fee on gross revenues they have to pay for metacrawler but not dogpile since they own dogpile outright and only licence metacrawler from netbot....set section 3.4
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