Take a glimpse at these great meta search tools

Kartoo

A unique search tool - if you like the idea of seeing your web results visually, this meta-search site shows the results with sites being interconnected by keywords. It creates a visual representation of your search results. While it takes some time and effort to master, this site allows you to customize search results and narrow down the list of results with a few clicks of the mouse. Kartoo can be extremely accurate. The presentation is useful for displays if you need that in your work.

Kartoo has also added a new search project, called UJiko. It claims to search four billion pages. Among its useful features, UJiko offers a selection of terms to help you refine your query. When you click on a result, that web page is stored by UJIKO and will instantly appear in the first results next time you search. You can also build results by grading the sites you see into useful or garbage. This allows you to customize and filter future results. What remains unclear is if they have built their own database, or are they buying it from one of the other search firms? Regardless, this is a useful new search tool.

Surfwax

This site takes a little work to get to know, but it has some wonderfully useful customizable features. Results can be sorted by relevance, source, alphabetical, and by how many you want listed. Like most meta-search tools, Surfwax searches against several search engines and brings back results. It recently added a news aggregator to collect news stories. Its "SiteSnaps" feature allows you to preview any page in the results and see where your terms appear in the document. It also mixes news stories into its search results.

What really makes Surfwax outstanding are its advanced features. After you register, you have access to "My search sets" which allows you to customize from thousands of sites. You choose the sites and build customized lists from their search partners as well as from many specialized search tools. This is a great timesaver if you regularly search a group of sources. Use it to build search sets on topics you do not know and it will help you find resources. Another advanced feature, "info cubby," is a bookmarks collection that saves URLs and snapshots of pages. You are limited to using the free collection, but more search sets are available by subscription.

Vivisimo

This is among the best of the meta-search tools. Vivisimo not only searches some of the top search engines and new sources on the web, it characterizes them into easily browsable categories based on your search phrase. This clustering technology is what makes it so valuable. Those who remember NorthernLight.com will recognize similar clustering categories.

Vivisimo can take the results from the search tools it looks at and instead of displaying the results as a list, will display the results as a hierarchy of topics. That is very useful when you are not familiar with a subject. Using that categorization know-how, Vivisimo has launched some very cool clustering tools on specific topics.

Using Visisimo's technology you can create different clusters based on different fields like subject headings, publication dates, authors, etc. Vivisimo also offers specialized clustering for searching the Ebay auction site, for searching the U.S. Federal Government's First Gov, and for science research using Scirus. Vivisimo also offers a page preview, allowing you to open a live version of the web page that is embedded in the results list. Vivisimo is a good first choice for a meta-search tool.

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