The top search engines in the game — Google, Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo,
to name a few — all scour the web every day for millions upon millions
of web pages to add to their search results. Yet still, when you search
among each of these services, you’ll virtually never get the exact same
results. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could search all of them at once to
maximize your ability to find what you’re looking for? Use these services to search multiple search engines and get the best results possible | Shutterstock
Well, it’s certainly possible. There are several websites and apps
that have combined all the best engines into a single search so you can
get a side-by-side view of each results page. This is especially handy
for gathering up all the top news articles across the Internet or a wide variety of images. Check out the best services for searching multiple engines below.
TheInfo.com
TheInfo.com is a
website that lets you choose between a variety of services for
performing your search. You can enable searching through Google,
Overture, MSN (now Bing) and Teoma, plus directories like About.com,
Google Directory and Yahoo Directory, the Metacrawler web crawler and
additional services like news and WebRing.
You can also select “All the web” with one click to automatically
search with Google, Overture, Bing and Teoma. The results pop up in
separate windows, so brace yourself.
Note: While the site Teoma is
still alive and well, I couldn’t get searches to work with it on
TheInfo.com. Perhaps try sticking to the other three engines for
comparison instead.
PolyCola.com
PolyCola is yet
another simple website that lets you pick two search engines from its
supported list and enter the same search query to view the different
results side by side. The supported engines are Google, Yahoo, Ask,
Dogpile and AOL.
Initially, on the home page you can choose from searching the web,
images and videos, but after performing a search PolyCola reveals you
can also search through news and shopping categories as well. It’s far
from the most elegantly designed website on the planet, but it works for
pitting two different search engines against each other.
Smart Search for iOS and Android
Smart Search & Web Browser is a free app for iOS and Android
— and one of the few — that combines several methods of search. It
actually supports the widest amount of search engines and services on
this list so far. Supported ones include Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Google
Images, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, eBay, Google Translate and Wikipedia.
While you can’t compare your results side to side, what I love about
the app is that you can enter a search query, quickly tap the menu at
the top and choose a new service, and the new results will automatically
load. You can speedily switch between results to compare with memory.
Smart Search also has a built-in web browser for accessing any other websites too.
Simul-Search for Mac
Brand new to the Mac, the $1 Simul-Search app
lets you simultaneously search Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo and Wikipedia.
The best part is that it searches in real time, so as soon as you start
typing, the results will begin loading.
The downside is that because results appear side by side, in order to
do so they have to be reduced down to their mobile versions.
Simul-Search does have convenient buttons though for opening one of the
results pages in Safari or all of them in separate tabs.
NooG on PC
A terrific and thorough app called NooG is available for Windows that lets you search through Google, Bing and Wikipedia.
