performance difference in metasearch

[CuriousMouse]

hi everyone i am very curious about the performance between metasearch and just general search engines. Are there any reasons to support the argument that a metasearch engine could achieve high retrieval effectiveness than a general-purpose search engine or vice verse?

thanks

[kettlewell]

I've found them to be similar in terms of time it takes to return a result... Is that what you are referring to?

I've found some of the meta search engines to be fairly aggressive at getting things into their indexing and so they get certain pieces of data indexed faster, but they don't have the resources to index as much of the web as someone like Google.

Matt

[CuriousMouse]

I've found them to be similar in terms of time it takes to return a result... Is that what you are referring to?

I've found some of the meta search engines to be fairly aggressive at getting things into their indexing and so they get certain pieces of data indexed faster, but they don't have the resources to index as much of the web as someone like Google.

Matt

hmmm i heard that there are cases when general purpose engine like google can achieve higher performance level or retrieval effectiveness than metasearch.
Do you think you could provide several reasons to support that argument?
like in what cases could that be the case? other than what you've mentioned above with indexing...

thanks

[kettlewell]

Well, this isn't quite my area of expertise

But having worked on some parallel computing applications, I'd guess that this is just a function of having more / better resources (computers, engineers, bandwidth, motivation, ambition, etc)

But because the big guys are so broad, sometimes the little guys (the meta crawlers) are effective at taking a small market and doing a better job through repetition - so not so broad, but more effective at updates because they have less to worry about.

So each can be faster than the other in certain situations... but that is just my hypothesis on why...

Matt