I wonder what is your opinion about webcrawler.com? That search engine is the earliest search engine, 4th search engine ever via Wikipedia that born in early 1994 right before Go.com born which is now part of Yahoo search engine. I have just discovered this search engine through reading the search engine history on Wikipedia, interesting history that is. If anyone want to read it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_search_engine Just started testing it out, I think I like it as it's basically combined all search engines into one by using all popular search engines such as Yahoo! Google, Bing and I believe ask altogether to bring the results of whatever you are looking for. Has tons of indexes I recognized.
At first glance it certainly looks like they've opted out and gone the meta engine way. I don't remember ever using it and the name was probably quite apt back when we didn't know what search engines were and the terminology was still "fluid".
WebCrawler was my main search engine way back in the earliest days of the internet. That one, Excite, and HotBot were the search engines I mainly used. Sometimes I used AltaVista. I used Yahoo in the late 1990s. Then along came Google. Used that for a while then went back to Yahoo. A search engine that has impressed me is Blekko. You should check it out.
I still vividly remember the first time I used Google. I can't tell you when my daughter said her first word, or what I did on 9/11, but I can see myself seeing Google's index page the very first time. Crap.
I never met a single person who has ever used a meta search engine, regularly. But, I'm assuming there are people that still use them, or how would they make money?
Does any one want to optimize there sites for webcrawler now... LOL Today first time i used it. Nice and simple.
It's a meta search engine so you optimise for the engines that it uses rather than for webcrawler itself.