ZapMeta

Introduction

ZapMeta is a multi/meta search engine that has been around since 2002, but I must confess that it has only just come to my notice. The home page is very Spartan, and reminds me of the way in which Google used to look when it first came out. There is a search box, an option to search the web or shopping, links to preferences and advanced searches and that’s just about it.

Preferences

Let’s start by taking a look at the preferences to see what we can do with this creature. You can set a timeout of anything between 1-20 seconds, which is very reasonable – many multi search engines don’t give you that option at all, or you’re limited to a smaller set of options. Results can be grouped, or they can be displayed – this means that results will remove duplicates by grouping pages with the same URL under one match. The number of results per page can be a number of options from 8 to All, which is nicely flexible. Results can be sorted by relevance, which you’d expect, but also by title and source, and either in ascending or descending order. I like this – it’s rather unusual, but I can see ways in which this could allow a searcher to jump much more quickly to particular pages or sites. Keywords can be highlighted or not; quite why someone wouldn’t want keywords highlighted is a bit of a mystery to me, but if you’re one of those folk, it’s an option for you. Pages can be opened in the same, or a new window; a useful feature, but nothing startling. You can choose to display description, sources, URL and page preview. This again is a nice feature, giving you more flexibility than you’ll find with many other engines. Finally we have a choice of nine search engines ZapMeta will use to search from. Oddly enough, not all of these are checked. The nine are AltaVista (unchecked), Yahoo (checked), Alltheweb (checked), Wisenut (checked), AOL (checked), MSN (checked), HotBot (checked), Open Directory (unchecked) and GigaBlast (unchecked). I do find this a little strange since the strength of a multi/meta search engine is surely to search as broadly as possible as a default, with an option of narrowing down to specific engines afterwards? Of course, you can easily set the default to search all the available choices, but I suspect that a lot of people won’t think of doing this at once. The other major point here to make is that Google is obviously missing from the list, but since AOL is included (and which is powered by Google) it’s not quite the omission that one might at first assume. One slight annoyance is that once you’ve set your preferences it’s not immediately clear how you can get back to the search screen (by clicking on the ZapMeta logo) which may cause some confusion or frustration.

Advanced search function

The Advanced Web Search functions not terribly exciting, and they’re what you’d expect to find. We have the usual boxes for ‘Must contain the words’, ‘Match the exact phrase’ and ‘Exclude the words’ with the options of ‘Anywhere’ ‘In the title’ ‘In the URL’ which are fine – a couple of years ago this would have been worth particular mention, but this is fairly pedestrian now. There’s a Domain filter, with options to limit by any one of 8 regions (it’s a shame there isn’t an option to choose a couple of regions though), by Domain (.com, co.uk, org and so on) or by Host, (phib.com or dell.com). Nice, but nothing fancy. The next option allows users to sort by relevance, URL, Popularity, Title and Source. This is an interesting option, and one that I’ll come back to later when I’m talking about the results that we get from the search engine. The final options are again uninspiring – results per page, display options, timeout and sources used. So, nothing special – it would have been nice to have seen search criteria based on media, news, images and so on.

Searching

Moving onto the search function now. I did a search on ‘Everton’ and got several sponsored listings before the ‘proper’ results which weren’t really appropriate at all, though to the right was a small box of ‘related searches’ which did include ‘Everton football’ and ‘Everton fc’, so I’ll give it marks for getting that right – or rather, picking up those options from Alltheweb. I had the main body of results ranked by order of relevance, and ZapMeta used the standard approach of ranking by number of search engines and position in the top ten. A nice function is the ‘Quick View’ of the page, which an increasing number of search engines are offering, providing you with an opportunity to view the page without having to actually visit it. The last section of the page offered me some Related categories, which mainly seemed to have been culled from Dmoz.

I re-ranked the search results by clicking on the ‘Popularity’ option, and ZapMeta managed this very quickly, re-ranking the results to give me the official club website as top of the listing. Quite what it based that on I don’t know – a failing of the site is that it’s not actually that forthcoming about such things, but as long as it works, I suppose that’s the main thing. Re-ranking by title was less useful, since I then had 1UpTravel.com as first in the list, which is logical, but of little interest to me. The Source option again put the official site back at the top of the listing, while the Domain option once again gave me 1UpTravel. Several other searches confirmed what I (and I suspect you) was already thinking – relevance and popularity are probably the most useful options, followed by title. However, it’s a refreshing change to be given the option! Another useful option was ‘search within these results’ which (although I seldom use it myself) was good to have available.

The layout of the results page was quite clear, although I did have one minor gripe, related to moving to the next page of results. The options given are:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 next > next 10
Clicking on ‘next 10’ did not take me to results 20-29, but to 101-110. Clearly, the ‘next 10’ option refers to pages 11 12 13 and so on. Logical when you think about it, but until you do, I can guarantee a quick double take when you look at the results!

Comparison with ez2www.com

I next wanted to see how the results I was getting matched up against other multi/meta search engines. However, once I started to look through my lists, the only one that really seemed a close contender was ez2www (now also known as ez2Find). Both it and ZapMeta shared a number of engines in common, specifically AltaVista, Yahoo, Alltheweb, Wisenut, MSN and Open Directory. Half a dozen shared engines is enough for comparative searching I think. The results can be seen in the table below:

On all eight searches ZapMeta performed better than ez2www, and although it’s obviously a subjective viewpoint, the results that I was getting seemed rather better. Theoretically all the results should have been the same, since the same engines were being used for the same amount of time. It’s possible that there were problems with timeouts, since I did all the ez2www searches first, and then all the Zapmeta searches next, but for all the results to come out in favour of one search engine does tend to imply that it is doing its job rather better. I would however encourage anyone to run some searches themselves – it’s more than possible that you’ll get a totally different set of results.

Conclusion

My conclusion is fairly short and to the point – ZapMeta has just taken over as my favourite multi/meta search engine. I’m happy with the features, the display and the results that I’m getting. I like the options for re-ranking and it just seems to be that bit sharper than the other engines in this category that I use. That of course doesn’t mean that I won’t continue to use them – far from it – but I think they’re going to have to do some upgrading pretty quickly in order to compete.

© Phil Bradley 2003. Please do not use this review without obtaining permission from me first please.