Meta search tools are another breed.   Be aware of these search tools that bring together aggregate results.   By John Bolduan RealWebMarketing.com

It seems as though everyone these days is focused on the major search engines and how their search results are doing there. It should be a main concern for those of us who live and die on being highly ranked. There is another form of search engine called meta search engines that are different from the majors. Meta search engines are actually a search tools that aggregates the results of several search engines. They display them sometimes with or without the credit as to where the result came from. For people who are only interested in the top results from various major search properties, it makes sense to use a meta search engine. 

There are several of these out there and some are Dogpile, Mamma, IceRocket and quite a few more. Really there are too many of these to even mention them all. The business model for these meta search companies is to deliver relevant results from many search engines and then offer a paid advertising theme. What you're paying for is the traffic that they get and relate the searches to your paid ads. It's a model that can sometimes work depending on what your goals are. At other times, it might just be a waste of money to buy paid ads on these meta search tools. 

Dogpile is one of the most popular meta search engines and they take search results from various places and lump them together looking like a regular search engine. They used to separate them by where it came from, they don't do that anymore.

Mamma is another popular one and they tell you where the results are coming from when they give you the results. This is a good thing because if you're getting good result from a particular search engine, you may want to know where to dig further.

IceRocket is a new one that's come out and has some financial backing from Mark Cuban. What I like about this one is you can do e-mail searches and get them returned to your e-mail box. It seems like no big deal, but it is if you don't have time to sit and do endless searching. Simply request it by e-mail and look at it when you have time. They also provide a thumbnail photo of the website, nice! I think this kind of little extra may propel some of these meta search tools into higher prominence. Be looking for changes in these as it may be helpful in some way to your business in the future.

Is there anything a website owner can do to get higher rankings in these meta search tools? No, because they pull from other search engines. You must work on getting your site listed well in all the regular search engines. You can't avoid working on your core marketing strategy. These meta search engines are a side benefit of getting good rankings.