How To Make The Most of The Dogpile Search Engine

Dogpile is a “metasearch” engine that generates search results from other search engines.  A metasearch engine finds results to queries by accessing other search engines and displaying results according to their source or by using other criteria. Dogpile was launched in 1996 and its name is derived from the act in Rugby where players come together and pile on each other. It is so named to give the image of bringing together the various search engines from which it compiles its results. Dogpile users can use it to search for results in the following categories: web, images, video, news, Yellow Pages, and White Pages.

Dogpile obtains its results from the following search engines and resources:

Google

Yahoo!

Bing (formerly Live Search)

Ask.com

Kosmix: an engine that arranges the Internet by topic pages so that users can explore the web by topic

Fandango: an online movie ticket service

Dogpile’s technology analyzes the results from the above sites and removes duplicate results displaying only relevant results.

Reasons to Use Dogpile

1. Dogpile accesses all the top search engines (Google, Yahoo! and Bing currently account for over 90% of all internet search traffic) and so users are assured of the quality of the displayed results. The other resources such as Kosmix and Fandango provide authoritative content on their subject matters such as purchasing movie tickets and getting movie times online.
2. Search engines are not the same. They use different techniques and algorithms to produce search results; and different search engines always display different results for the same query. Different search engines also differ in which results they highlight as relevant based on a number of criteria. Dogpile aggregates all the relevant results giving a user the best results from all the sites it accesses.
3. Dogpile shortens the time a user spends searching for results especially if the user might have to use different search engines to locate a relevant result.
4. Searching for telephone numbers on the web is easier using Dogpile’s Yellow Pages and White Pages options.
5. Dogpile is safe to use as a user’s recent searches list is cleared once the browser window is closed. No personal information is saved or shared.

Tips on Using Dogpile

1. To increase privacy, the Recent Searches option can be turned off by going to the Preferences page and selecting the Recent Searches off option.
2. Dogpile includes sponsored (paid) results with non-sponsored results. Check a particular result to see which it is (sponsored results are usually identified as such) to ensure that you choose a search result which is relevant to you.
3. Adult content can be filtered from search results by changing settings on the Preferences page to:

Moderate - which filters only multimedia searches such as images and video or

Heavy – This filters all searches.

Dogpile is a free and time-saving resource. It can be found at http://www.dogpile.com.