Meta Search
What it is and how to find one.
A Meta Search is the term used to define a search engine that searches search engines. A powerful Meta Search Engine can search up to over a 100 search engines at the same time and return the top results of those Search Engines. With Meta Search, it is not necessary to separately go to Hotbot or AltaVista or Google. Meta Search conveniently searches all of them and then puts the results on a single page.
However, there are drawbacks. When searching for hard to find or illegal material such as warez, many search engines are redundant. They return similar results. When Meta Search searches for these topics, they may actually delay you by returning a few hundred links that all link to the exact same website because those sites are the top sites on the other search engines.
A few examples of Meta Searches Engines ranked from best to modest:
http://www.profusion.com/
http://www.surfwax.com/
http://www.allsearchengines.com/
http://www.westlazer.com/search.htm/
There are also programs that can emulate Meta Searches and can be downloaded. The statistically best one currently is Copernic. It can be downloaded for free at http://www.copernic.com