From Metasearching to Discovery: The University of Florida Experience

Definition, History, And Overview Of Metasearching

A metasearch (now often used interchangeably with parallel search, federated search, broadcast search, cross-database search or search portal) is a search simultaneously conducted across several bibliographic and full-text databases, platforms, vendors, sources and protocols using a single search interface. The search results may be returned in various ways (listed by database or in a merged list; sorted by relevancy, date, or other attributes; de-duplicated or not) but always in a consistent format.

How did metasearching evolve? As Judy Luther stated in a Library Journal article published in 2003, “Metasearch isn’t a new concept. Dialog in the 1970s and subsequently SilverPlatter executed a single search simultaneously across multiple bibliographic databases” (Luther, 2003, p. 37). The mid to late 1990s saw not only the introduction of Google (named search engine of choice in the Top 100 Web Sites for 1998 by PC Magazine), but also Web metacrawlers or metasearch engines such as Dogpile, WebCrawler and Metacrawler that could execute a single search query across multiple search engines to retrieve search results.