this post was submitted on 25 May 2026
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I can't remember the name, but when the internet was just starting and there were a lot of search engines with no dominate ones, there was an aggregator program that you could input many search engines into, then use it as the searching tool. It would query all the engines and combine, sort, rank, and remove duplicate finds.
Edit: more specific - It was much like an FTP or torrent program but you'd load up what search engines to use and your search words, and it would actively pull the info then provide a single page with all results.
The reason I mention it is because we're sort of back at that point. Google is failing, Bing never was great, and all the alternatives have their issues, usually with not having the same database to work with. So if you gathered all the best ones, the ones without ties to corporate or AI, then put their results together, maybe you'd have something like what Google was at its peak before "do no evil" got painted over.
Incidentally, Google became what it was/is because it gobbled up a lot of those early search engines' databases. I miss you, Hotbot. You were a good one.
Was it MetaCrawler? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaCrawler
SearXNG is the spiritual successor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SearXNG
No, I don't see mention of it being an application but like Dogpile is a web-based collector.
I did a search myself, but (given how searching sucks now) couldn't find anything. Lots of hits for search engines themselves, but getting past that to other methods back then is difficult.
It was much like an FTP or torrent program but you'd load up what search engines to use and your search words, and it would actively pull the info then provide a single page with all results.
I thought it was Autonomy. You installed a program, instructed puppies agents, logged out, and while you were offline the puppies searched through several engines. Next time you logged in the findings waited for you. That was the time of 56k modems and metered connections.