Same Dog - A Different Pile
This week my attention has been drawn towards the meta-search king Dogpile... yes, Dogpile. For those of you not familiar with Dogpile, it is a meta-search engine currently owned and operated by Infospace. Just this past week, Dogpile released a newly redesigned website and with that has introduced a nifty new utility that visually displays the overlap (or lack thereof) of results from multiple search engines... a utility truly worth blogging about.
The major focus of the redesign took place on their result pages, which now present twenty of the best results from the top Internet search engines. Dogpile results are configured by combining the individual results from a number of search engines, including Google, Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves, sponsored listings from Google, Yahoo! Search Marketing and LookSmart, using Dogpile's own relevance algorithms. While this isn't too different from the way Dogpile used to display results, a cool new feature lets you simultaneously display blended results side-by-side with results from one or more individual search sources by clicking a button at the top of the result page. Results from an individual source open in a window to the right of the blended results, and you can open up results from every source other than Dogpile's web search picks simultaneously.
This makes it easy for us, search engine marketing consultants and firms, to directly compare the top results from these different engines. Dogpile has taken this a step further by highlighting results that are unique to the first result page for each engine. For example, if a result shows up in the first page of a Yahoo! search but not in any other search source, it is shaded with a pale yellow background. You can turn this highlighting on or off using a check box at the top of the result list.
The intent is to visually demonstrate the value of Meta search by showing the lack of overlap in the top results of the major search engines. By comparing results side-by-side, it quickly becomes apparent that each search engine has its own unique view of the web, and therefore, if you are currently optimizing for a single source of search results, you' are no doubt missing a significant chunk of the Internet search community.
The major focus of the redesign took place on their result pages, which now present twenty of the best results from the top Internet search engines. Dogpile results are configured by combining the individual results from a number of search engines, including Google, Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves, sponsored listings from Google, Yahoo! Search Marketing and LookSmart, using Dogpile's own relevance algorithms. While this isn't too different from the way Dogpile used to display results, a cool new feature lets you simultaneously display blended results side-by-side with results from one or more individual search sources by clicking a button at the top of the result page. Results from an individual source open in a window to the right of the blended results, and you can open up results from every source other than Dogpile's web search picks simultaneously.
This makes it easy for us, search engine marketing consultants and firms, to directly compare the top results from these different engines. Dogpile has taken this a step further by highlighting results that are unique to the first result page for each engine. For example, if a result shows up in the first page of a Yahoo! search but not in any other search source, it is shaded with a pale yellow background. You can turn this highlighting on or off using a check box at the top of the result list.
The intent is to visually demonstrate the value of Meta search by showing the lack of overlap in the top results of the major search engines. By comparing results side-by-side, it quickly becomes apparent that each search engine has its own unique view of the web, and therefore, if you are currently optimizing for a single source of search results, you' are no doubt missing a significant chunk of the Internet search community.
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posted by Karl Ribas Friday, May 20, 2005 Read Comments (0) | Post a Comment | Subscribe  
 
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