Four Useful Engines for Multiple-Site Searches

As search engines continue to proliferate on the web, sites that aggregate results from many engines do too. Especially for doing comparisons on things like technology products you may be interested in purchasing, or comparing news results from various sites, this can be very handy. You can also often save time because of the sheer number of results you tend to get back in one view.

Here are four useful sites that specialize in this, all from different angles.

Joongel is an interesting way to search collections of 10 sites at once–and that doesn’t mean just one collection of 10. You can do an Images search which will scour Google, Yahoo, Flickr, Webshots and other sites concurrently. You can also search social sites concurrently, including Digg, Twitter, Reddit, Yahoo! Buzz, and many more. It’s worth a try.

SearchBoth lets you search several different types of sites at the same time and view results together, but the view web workers are likely to get the most use out of is searching Google and Yahoo at the same time. At the site’s home page, you can enter your search term once, hit Search, and get back a dual-paned view of the results. Among the other types of dual searches you can do, you can search both Orbitz and Travelocity airfare prices by entering in one Departing and Destination citation.

Dogpile, of course, is one of the oldest of the multiple site search engines. It scours Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft Live Search, and Ask.com concurrently and lets you use tabs to specify what sections of the sites you want to search. For example, you can search all four sites for images, for video, or for news.

Recently, I covered Viewzi, which doesn’t just search for content from multiple sites but mashes up your search results in useful, graphical ways. For example, a search on “netbooks” returns results from Google, Forbes, CNet, Wikipedia, GigaOm, and many other sites–in text versions. If I want to see images from the various sites instead, I can click once to do that, or select other multiple-site views.

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