The exponential growth of information source on the web and in turn continuing technological progress of searching the information by using tools like Search Engines gives rise to many problems for the user to know which tool is best for their query and which tool is not. At this time Metasearch Engine comes into play by reducing the user burden by dispatching queries to multiple search engines in parallel and refining the results of these search engines to give the best out of best by doing superior job on their side. These engines do not own a database of Web pages rather they send search terms to the databases maintained by the search engine companies, get back results from all the search engines queried and then compile the results to be presented to the user. In this paper, we describe the working of a typical metasearch engine and then present a comparative study of traditional search engines and metasearch engines on the basis of different parameters and show how metasearch engines are better than the other search engines.

翻译：随着网络信息源的指数级增长以及搜索引擎等工具在信息检索技术上的持续进步，用户面临诸多问题：难以判断何种工具最适合其查询需求，何种工具效果欠佳。此时，元搜索引擎应运而生，它通过将查询请求并行分发给多个搜索引擎，并对各引擎返回的结果进行优化整合，从而减轻用户负担，在自身层面完成更高效的工作，实现"优中选优"。这类引擎并不拥有网页数据库，而是将检索词发送至搜索引擎公司维护的数据库，获取所有被查询引擎的返回结果后，对结果进行汇编并呈现给用户。本文阐述典型元搜索引擎的工作原理，基于不同参数对传统搜索引擎与元搜索引擎进行比较研究，并论证元搜索引擎相较于其他搜索引擎的优越性。