In the past year or so, there has been a mini uprising of new search engines with more features compared to Google/Yahoo/Bing. Get introduced to three such search engines after the break.
Of these Heapr is the most straightforward. Its a basic aggregated search engine that puts results of google and twitter/wolframalpha/wikipedia (you choose between these) on the same page and displays it to you. Similarly, on the image search it displays Google image results on the left of the screen and flickr results on the left.
Such functionality has been seen in add-on-ed Firefox browsers (Eg: WebMynd) and User Javascripts. Heapr is incorporating this into their website itself. Thus making it simpler for end user masses. But Heapr's USP is its incredible speed. It claims to be faster than even google. The basis of this claim is that heapr displays results with each keystroke. So it renders hitting Enter useless. Clever.
Nibbo is somewhat the same as Heapr. Its powered by Google too. The difference is that it seems to be reorganizing its results by an indigenous algorithm. Moreover, it is more functional than heapr as it gives the user an option to preview Video and news results too without navigating away from the results page. But it seems to be relatively slower, even when compared to Google. It also boasts intuitive search refining options.
Duck Duck Go is easily the most unique meta-search i have come across. Its wikipedia page says that it "uses information from crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia) with the aim of augmenting traditional results and improving relevance."
And in my limited experience with it, it certainly has accomplished what it claims to do. And the results have been very usable and intuitive. It seems Duck Duck Go is a true meta-search powered by Yahoo!, WikiPedia and its own engine called DuckDuckbot.
It's not within the scope of this article to compare these new engines with Google etc. on any real technical level. But I do suggest that you try them out. You might just find them more to your liking than Google. In any case, they are definitely worth a try.
And I do believe it isn't long before this type of search catches on and replaces traditional search. Indeed, Google has since long been inserting Image and news results (where relevant) in their results pages, but their implementation has been relatively rudimentary. We might just see Google going the way of Nibbo; they may even implement a WebMynd-esque sidebar/side results. I don't see why they wouldn't, as it definitely increases functionality without complicating things too much.
P.S: I sadly can't stake a claim to have coined the term 'meta-search', but I did come up with it on my own, if that is any consolation :(.
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