Meta Search

A process of searching several databases simultaneously and combining the results.
 

MetaSearch Engine
A search engine that searches multiple other search engines and combines the results.
Currently the top Meta Search Engine is Go2net.com.

  Meta Tag
Author generated HTML commands that are placed in the head section of an HTML
document. Current popular meta tags that can affect search engine rankings, are
Meta Keywords, and Meta Description.

Meta KEYWORDS tag is used to group a series of words that relate to a website.
These tags can be used by search engines to classify pages for searches.

The Meta DESCRIPTION is used to describe the document. The meta description is
then displayed in search engine results.

The Robots Meta Tag is used to control certain aspect of how a search engine indexes
 the page.

An HTTP-EQUIV meta tag can sometimes be used to issue some server HTTP
commands. Most common is a HTTP REFRESH command. Gaining in popularity is a
NOCACHE command to thwart server caching of a page.

Other useful tags are the CHAR SET tag to describe the document language and
character set. The Author meta tag and the Generator meta tag (software used to
generate the page).

Metacrawler
A large meta search engine now called Go2net.com.

  Metafind
Another meta search engine.

  Mining Company
Former name of About.com.

  MirrorSite
A shadow duplicate copy of a web site at a separate url. This allows websites to
spread out the resource load on a server. Mirror sites are difficult to get indexed properly
 by search engine. Search engines view the multiple duplicate pages as spamming.

  Misspellings
Intentionally making a spelling mistake in meta keywords or meta tags to catch search
 engine users who also misspell words when searching.

  Multi Titles
Another old defunct trick where authors would double up the titles in a page to increase
search engine relevancy.

  Multiple Keyword Tags
Using two or three keyword META tags to increase the relevancy of a page.
This technique is considered spam by most search engines and should be avoided.