The major game search engines – Google, Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo, to name a few – all scour the web every day looking for millions and millions of web pages to add to their search results. . Yet when you search through each of these services, you will hardly ever get the exact same results. Wouldn't it be nice if you could search them all at once to maximize your ability to find what you're looking for?
ContentsL'Info.comPolyCola.comSmart search for iOS and AndroidSimultaneous search for MacNooG on PC
Well, it is certainly possible. There are several websites and apps that have combined all the top search engines into one search so you can get a side-by-side view of each results page. This is especially handy for gathering all the top news articles on the internet or a wide variety of images. Check out the best search services from multiple engines below.
TheInfo.com is a website that lets you choose from a variety of services to do your research. You can enable search through Google, Overture, MSN (now Bing) and Teoma, as well as 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 appear in separate windows, so be prepared.
Note: Although the Teoma site is still alive and well, I couldn't get TheInfo.com searches to work. Maybe try sticking with the other three engines for comparison.PolyCola is another simple website that lets you choose two search engines from its supported list and enter the same search query to view the different results side by side. Supported engines are Google, Yahoo, Ask, Dogpile and AOL.
Initially, on the homepage, you can choose to search the web, images, and videos, but after doing a search, PolyCola reveals that you can also search the news and shopping categories. 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 &Web Browser is a free app for iOS and Android – and one of the few – that combines multiple search methods. It supports the most search engines and services on this list so far. Those supported include Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Google Images, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, eBay, Google Translate, and Wikipedia.
While you can't compare your results side by 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 new results will load automatically. You can quickly switch between results to compare with memory.
Smart Search also has a built-in web browser to access other websites.
Brand new to the Mac, the $1 Simul-Search app lets you search Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Wikipedia simultaneously. The best part is that it searches in real time, so as soon as you start typing, the results will start loading.
The downside is that because the results appear side-by-side, to do this they must be collapsed to their mobile versions. Simul-Search however has some handy buttons to open one of the results pages in Safari or all of them in separate tabs.
A great and comprehensive application called NooG is available for Windows which allows you to search Google, Bing and Wikipedia. We've written a comprehensive guide on this, so be sure to check out this article on Guiding Tech.
ALSO SEE: 3 Effective Tips for Using Wikipedia as an Amazing Research Source
