What is Mamma Metasearch?
Mamma bills itself as the "mother of all search engines"; and while that's a claim that could be disputed, Mamma puts out a pretty good metasearch engine experience. Mamma retrieves results from approximately a dozen major Internet search engines and directories and has a few nice extra search features that are worth a try.Mamma Home Page
The Mamma home page is clean and uncluttered, and right above the main search query box are a few different tabbed options: the Web (of course), News, Images, Yellow Pages, and the White Pages.Mamma Metasearch
Searching with Mamma Metasearch is easy. Just type in a word or phrase and go. Here's my example: I typed in antelope.First of all, I saw Mamma Classifieds at the very top of the search results page. From the site: "Results in "Mamma Classifieds" are paid placement listings, meaning that every time you click upon one of them, Mamma receives payment from the site owner/advertiser."
Underneath the Classifeds are Sponsored Links, which are very similar in that someone had to pay Mamma in order for those to show up (they're ads). To the right of the main search results, you'll see "Refine Your Search." These are clustered search suggestions that take your original query, in my case "antelope", and give you more search terms that you might not have thought of. For example, I was given Wyoming Hunting, Antelope Canyon, and African Antelope. Not all of the Search Refinements will be relevant to your search but it's a nice feature nonetheless.
Mamma Metasearch Engine Search Results
In order to filter out spammy "extra" results, a common problem in metasearch engines since they're searching for the same thing in different search engines, Mamma has a unique way that they filter and rank their search results. Basically, each duplicate that Mamma finds is weighted as a "vote" for that term. Mamma explains it better:"Instead of simply eliminating the duplicates as many metasearch engines may do, we use this information to rank our results. Each duplicate search result is considered a 'vote' for that result. Pages with the highest number of votes go at the top of our result set."
In addition, underneath every search result's textual description, you're going to see where that result was retrieved from in square brackets. For example, with one of the search results in my example search, I received the following: Wisenut, Entireweb, Gigablast, Business.com, Yahoo, and Open Directory. What this string of search services is telling me is this: the first source listed is where my result actually was retrieved from, and the rest are duplicates.
You also might see the words "Paid Result" in the string of search services; this means that this result is a Paid Result - again, it's an ad.
