How do search engines like dogpile.com work? Do they search each search engine individually, then whatever comes on top most frequently they then use as your search result? Is it good if your website is #1 on these times of websites work? Thanks!
Meta-search engines collect their results from a number of different sources and then list the results in an order based on the number of times each result have been found on each of the sources. Example: If 'website A' ranks #1 on Google, #2 on Bing and #3 on Yahoo and 'website B' ranks #2 on Google, #1 on Bing and #1 on Yahoo, 'website B' will often win. There are of course meta-search engines out there that take other aspects into consideration, but most of them, just count.
Wow, that's pretty strange. I didn't know that websites would do that, but does it make sense to do this sort of search? Say I was looking for some school related website to learn about physics or something. Would these search engines work better? To me they don't seem to work better.
Some search engines ( not all ) offer XML feeds for there searches. The XML feeds are given a certain weight as are the specific results rank number. If a result occurs multiple times it is often considered highly relevant. If a search only shows up one time, or has other faulty characteristics it is bumped to the bottom of the list. Every metasearch engine has there own alogrythm and sometimes its quite secret.