Sourcing with Metasearch Engines

In simple terms, a metasearch engine is an aggregator of data. It uses another search engine to produce results. In most cases, it uses either several search engines or crawls specific pages.

I’d like to find software engineers or software developers that know Python, but don’t show me any results about snakes. Using Google, the query would need to be formulated like this:

("software engineer" | "software developer") python -snake

This is a comparison of a few metasearch engines using this search query.

1. All the Internet

It is described as ‘All the internet for Google Chrome.’ Let’s try the query:

("software engineer" | "software developer") python -snake

It opens a new window (tab) and the first eight results are ads. Each result has a tag on the left of the hyperlink. The tag says either ‘Ad’ or ‘Web’. There are more Ads than organic results.

Let’s do a side by side comparison with Google.

Google results are mostly from: indeed, glassdoor, and greenhouse.

Alltheinternet shows results from these domains:

daxx.com
builtinla.com
lifeatexpedia.com
technical.ly
deliveryhero.com
codefellows.org

Despite the cluttered homepage and all the Ad results, it gave some interesting results. The search engine also has a short Boolean help at the bottom of the home page.

2. eTools

This one is branded as ‘the transparent Metasearch engine from Switzerland.’ The design is outdated. Let’s try the query:

("software engineer" | "software developer") python -snake

Above all results there are two filter options:

Country. Default is ‘worldwide’
Language. Default is ‘all’

On the right side, there are more filter options

Source. Default is ‘All’, options are: Ask, Duckduckgo, Exalead, Google, Mojeek, Wikipedia, Yandex
Domain (TLD)
Topic. Jobs, programmer, technology, salaries, etc.

Let’s see the results:

No ads
Each result shows the source. For instance, the first result says Source: Google | Yandex
On the left of each result, it has a ‘relevance’ bar. The first result says Relevance 10/10 | Sources: 2/7

Each result has a link with status. The first result shows this:

Status code:    200 - Document exists
IP address:     169.45.207.200
AS information:     AS36351 SoftLayer Technologies Inc.
Cookie sent:    Yes
Content type:   text/html;charset=UTF-8
Content length:     Undefined
Last modified:  Undefined
Response duration:  1.40 seconds
Server software:    nginx
Server location:    ISO country code: US (United States) (US)
External links:     RIPE | Netcraft | Alexa

It shows these results:

stepstone.de
youtube ‘a day in the life of a software engineer python’
startus.cc
some Wikipedia articles
ZipRecruiter

I watched a bit of that video and saw that youtube has dozens of videos that start with a day in the life of a.

This is a great metasearch engine so far.

3. qwant

This one has a modern and responsive interface. It has a pop-up that says ‘The only European search engine, we are cookie-free, we don’t keep any search history.’

Let’s run the query:

("software engineer" | "software developer") python -snake

The query was really fast. The results don’t show any ads. It doesn’t have additional filters like eTools. Let’s look at some of the results:

It has indeed, glassdoor, payscale, youtube, quora. The same youtube result. It auto loads when scrolling and it didn’t show pagination. However, it has a few other interesting results:

letsintern.com
educba.com
workable.com
naukri.com
codementor.io

I looked into this last result in more detail and found a list of freelance python developers.

Qwant seems to be more of a platform than just a search engine. It has a well-designed interface but I preferred the results and filters from eTools.

4. weboasis

The interface reminds me of Neo looking for the Matrix. Upon entering the query:

("software engineer" | "software developer") python -snake

The search field has options to choose a search engine. I selected SearchEncrypt.

However, the search didn’t go through. It opened SearchEncrypt on a new tab. I’ve never used this search engine. I tried a similar query on this engine: python "software engineer" -snake. Other than the usual suspects, indeed and glassdoor, it has a lot of interesting results. Another rabbit hole.

Back to weboasis, under the search field, there are a few filters. One of them is related to coding sites. Here are some interesting options I found:

hackwage
awesome cheatsheets (for programming languages)
public APIs

This is definitely a metasearch engine to source technical folks. It has a lot of rabbit holes that I hope you can explore.