Are Meta Search Engines popular or Unpopular?

Do people really use meta search engines, I ve read several articles that these are a good tool for keyword research for seo.
Are these made live only for seo purpose alone, I mostly use google, yahoo or msn. If i dun get it, i search back with a different query.
though I collected and tested a list of meta search engines after reading about them, I dun get a thought to use them when i dun find the results what i search for. Its a major part of seo to concentrate on a topic first before going for the actual experimenting to fulfill allthose things created by the search engines. And when the meta search engines thrive to give the best relevant results, why dun we use them? I would like to know what u guys think, how u research when given unfamiliar topic? please tell me which meta search engines are really popular with the users

I personally only use metasearch engines. I feel I get better results with them. Each SE has defaults and strengths, put together they deliver better results.

My two cents.

I think mainly SEOs are interested in SEs beyond the "big 3" with some exception for Ask. Keep in mind more than 50% of the world's searching is done through Google. And Yahoo! & MSN make another 30-40% together. Ask gets around 6%. Europe and China have their own popular SEs as well. That doesn't leave many "left overs" for the meta engines.

About five or six years ago, I used meta search engines almost exclusively because they gave better results. That doesn't seem to be necessary anymore.

I personally own a meta search and we do between 1.3 and 2 million searches a month. Its important to keep in mind that meta searches are really just "parsers" and not really search engines.

On GunMuse Outdoors though the searches are very topically and related to the outdoors, hunting, fishing and firearm industry. This gives us a degree of control over a vertical in the search business(all be it the lowest paying vertical in the search business).

The secret then to a meta search's niche then becomes its backfill. While I run my own crawler for this backfill because not even the big three have quality results on these topics and I just hand pick who I will crawl keeping my results very on target.

Its also best to Ignore Alexa if your searching for niche meta searches as these tend to be very bogus. My outdoor site went from an Alexa 2000 to a 300,000 while INCREASING traffic. Seems some people don't like to acknowledge competition even focused comp.

Ok here is more of the "overwelming" that is bogus information. And this is a great place to talk about it. Previously I talked about "back fill" on meta search.

If Dogpile does 70 million searches a month. - google counts 70 million searches as well. THey are not google's clients they are dog piles. But google will quote the statistic.

If someone searches for Fly fishing on GunMuse. 13 ENGINES will register that search, while I will only display 3 listings from the 130 results that I will pull from them. Now If I am using a low level search (and I don't) that search may actually record up to 5 times as it bounces through partners.

So when you Search on My site Your actually searching on Overture, Miva(findwhat) and so on. Now I will go through and filter Duplicates as all of my partners are usually partnered with Overture(they have the highest bids).

Trust me I am very LIGHT on how many search listings I parse as I drop poor performing partners.

So when we do 1 million searches on our site the "search industry" will count 13 million searches. That's 12 million that didn't take place and guess what. That's 13 million that I don't get credit for.

If you want to get to "TRUE AVERAGE" I found it best to divide by 20 on most keywords and 50 on "popular" keywords and it will give you a much better indicator of the market.


THEN there is is the AD-BOX technology. We have had our own "google style" ad box for 3 years now and where we deploy that it counts as a search on all 13 engines with each page display. This can be 30-40 million times a month(crawler traffic really drives the numbers up)

Trust me the searches count every unfilitered similarity to a search when they quote their numbers.

Google chases the "Tail" of the industry because sites like mine can really provide more "true" traffic and it boost's their search power marketing campaign.

Meta search engines can be a good solution, because they are able to pass over the weaknes of a single SE.

However I really doubt they are used too much (compairing with the three big, regular SEs).