Search Google, Yahoo, MSN and Jeeves concurrently

With the help of Myriad Search, search four top search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask Jeeves) concurrently and return weighted results.

Why weighted results? How is that useful?

Myriad Search takes the results from the aformentioned search engines and places a weight value to each. It then computes its own results list based on that weighting (More information of the weighting formula).

By combining the results from all four search engines, Myriad Search saves a lot of work and offers very valuable information:

1) More relevant search results
2) Find a more complete list of competitors
3) Find a more complete list of potential link partners
4) Another means to find authority sites

Why weight the results?

Each of the four search engines is flawed. None of them truly provide relevant results all the time. By weighting the results from each, a better sense of relevancy is gained (though still imperfect).

It is easy to use Myriad Search. Enter a keyword phrase in the search box and click ‘search’.

Myriad returns the results under 5 tabbed headings. The 2nd through 5th tab are the results for each individual search engine. Want to see the results just for Google? Click the Google tab.

The ‘All’ tab displays the weighted results. The description under each link is color coded. Each color represents a search engine (the tabs for the individual search engine results are colored accordingly). For each result, the user can then see what description of the site is returned by each engine. Often it is the same, but sometimes it is not. This is especially helpful in discovering how your own website’s description is displayed.

Under each results is a set of numbers:
#1 -80% – Google (4) yahoo(1) msn(1)

These numbers are fairly easy to understand:
#X – the rank within the weighted results
XX% – this is a percent authority/relevancy for a site
search engine (X) – this is the rank for the given search engine

So to interpret the line above: The result is ranked first (it is the most relevant). It’s weighted authority score is 80%. It ranked 4th on Google but first on both Yahoo and MSN. It did not appear in the top ten listings (I had set ’10′ as an Results Returned option) for Ask Jeeves.

Myriad Search Options:

There are several different options that can be used when using Myriad Search.

Results: How many results per engine? Choosing 10 will focus soley on the top ten results from each engine. Searching deeper, say 40 or 50, will potentially dig up more relevant sites that are worth looking at but are often missed.

Duplicates: By limiting duplicates, the results become more ‘pure’.

Google Key: Myriad Search uses its own Google Key. However, if at the end of the day it has used all 1000 of its searches on Google, it will cease to function. Entering a new Google API key (ie your own personal Google API) will let it continue to work.

Alexa Rank: Checking this box will throw the Alexa Rank for each site into the weighting formula. This also slows down the time it takes for results to return. Personally, I am wary of Alexa Rank since I don’t feel it is an adequate reflection of web usage.

Bias: Choose a number to add or remove the weight of a particular engine. Entering 5 adds the most weight. ‘Exclude’ removes highly irrelvant results from the mix. ‘Require’ ensures that the most relevant searches are included.

I personally have left all the options at their defaults, expect for number of results returned. It takes practice to see how each option affects the weighted results. It is best to use the tool in default mode until all the options are understood.