what is actually meta-search and can you give some example?

Answer 1

http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/MetaSearch.html


What Are "Meta-Search" Engines? How Do They Work?

In a meta-search engine, you submit keywords in its search box, and it transmits your search simultaneously to several individual search engines and their databases of web pages. Within a few seconds, you get back results from all the search engines queried. Meta-search engines do not own a database of Web pages; they send your search terms to the databases maintained by search engine companies.
Are "Smarter" Meta-Searchers Still Smarter?

"Smarter" meta-searcher technology includes clustering and linguistic analysis that attempts to show you themes within results, and some fancy textual analysis and display that can help you dig deeply into a set of results. However, neither of these technologies is any better than the quality of the search engine databases they obtain results from. This is the topic of an insightful article titled, "Some Cautionary Notes on Vivisimo," by librarian and professional researcher, Rita Vine of Working Faster. But here is another viewpoint favoring meta-searching by saying "More heads better than one."

Few meta-searchers allow you to delve into the largest, most useful search engine databases. They tend to return results from smaller and/or free search engines and miscellaneous free directories, often small and highly commercial. (But see Dogpile, below. Dogpile also offers a unique parallel mode for viewing and comparing each search engine's results. Useful to see how little/much overlap.)

Although we honor the potential of clustering technologies and textual analysis machines, we have ceased recommending any meta-searchers in our drop-in workshops at UC Berkeley. We recommend directly searching each search engine and recommend AGAINST using meta-searchers.

The meta-search tools listed here are "use at your own risk." We are not endorsing or recommending them.

Answer 2

A search of searches. A query is submitted to more than one search engine or directory, and results are reported from all the engines, possibly after removal of duplicates and sorting. Also the meta search engine of the same name, found at http://www.metasearch.com.

It is a search engine that searches multiple databases and combine the results into one page.

Regards,
Arunagiri GT

Answer 3

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta-search

Answer 4

Are we talking about metashearch?
is an shearch engine like- Google,need2find,and others
http://metasearch.com/