Simultaneous Multi Search Engine Searching

From the OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) perspective, it is surprising that Google remains the single best search engine of choice for around 85-90% of the search market for the last 20 years at least While others, take up single-figure percentages each

Why Use A Simultaneous Multiple Search Engine?

Those smaller search engines do have tremendous currency for the OSINT/Privacy community etc so those smaller Google alternatives can actually bear an 80-90% usage rate in some user communities

This pays off when considering that the main players like Google, Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo, et al all continually scour the WWW for millions upon millions of web pages to add to their search results. Yet, their results typically yield differences of around 70% out of the first 100 search results This is a reflection of different search engine companies using different search algorithms and filtering techniques. This is what makes OSINT interesting and useful for researching news articles and images etc.

Looking back to the days of the simultaneous’ four-search-engine’ ‘Technorati’ application, the quality of web search results in the 2010s was then a real issue, especially for the emerging OSINT tradecraft The subsequent years have seen the major search engines tighten up their

respective algorithms, introduced privatised results from Bing and Google and developed their own web-crawling site indexes. This has changed the search market and OSINT considerably.

Searching using a simultaneous multiple search engine will perform a search query on more than one search engine and maximise your ability to find what you are looking for. Various websites do offer services to combine all the best engines into a single search engine This enables a user to get a side-by-side glance at each result. However, it appears that many now require some form of technical knowledge to enable browser add-ons, GitHub technical capability or some coding or technical skill; but this also means that there are more bespoke choices now.

Popular Simultaneous Multiple Search Engine Applications

In terms of straightforward, non-coding, non-technical usability, it appears that the main simultaneous multi-search engine applications include the following:

InternetSearchWeb appears to be a straightforward, click-and-go site that searches around 100 multiple search engines, video, image, socials, shopping and other search engines. Fast search enables general, meta, and top 50 alternative search engines, the top 20 anonymous private search engines, the top 10 secured safe search engines, and the top 100 best search engines at the same time. It also enables searching across multiple websites at once, including the same keywords without re-typing

Another contender is the SmartSEARCH App, which allows a fast useable intuitive method to search across multiple browsers, search sources, engines and services, including the main search engines, YouTube, Amazon, eBay, Translate, Wiki, Twitter, socials, news, sports, and many more. Overall, SmartREACH appears ideally suited for mobile devices.

There are many more contenders out there but a noticeable development is that many are ‘roll-a-dexed’’ into compartmentalised choices for say ‘private/anonymous’ searching, or specifically shopping, social media, or news/sport etc

This makes sense to the OSINT-er because we appreciate the sheer volume of internet content and results that need instant filtering So being selective at this initial stage of using a multiple-search engine App now makes sense in 2023 compared to 2010!

SearchBoth.net allows one to search simultaneously on two search engines at once, for example, combinations such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, MetaCrawler, AltaVista and WebSearch You can only use any two search engines at a time, and this makes sense given the volume of results that could be returned and the greater need to have larger reading panels side-by-side to interpret those results; any more than this risks getting overwhelmed by data very quickly This is perhaps why the 4-engine simultaneous Technorati application from the 2010s appears to have expired. Although, one could, of course, have a number of ‘SearchBoth’ engines running together on separate tabs of course so you are in effect searching 6 or 12 engines at once!

The Future Of Search Engines

Despite narrowing down the choices here for non-tech users, the market and the OSINT space are about to get interesting again The introduction of Bing ChatGPT and Google Bard will likely see new competition between artificial intelligence and its potential to revolutionise searching and OSINT. Now the OSINT-er has an AI to contend with, to train, to understand sufficiently well so as not to be inadvertently ‘directed/influenced’ by the AI itself ‘choosing’ what it considers the better-desired results of its master when the OSINT-er should be after a truth.

The point is that no matter what happens, there will undoubtedly continue to be speciality search engines that offer a superior search experience over Google and others. They will be accompanied by other search engines for bespoke hardcore OSINT, shopping, or news and business intelligence etc as well as now exploiting ChatGPT/Bard; using AI to search and actually make some form of decision about what to return to the user. All this will certainly add a new interesting component to search results e g could/would ChatGPT/Bard adversely influence the user, or make the OSINT-er’s job harder/easier?

It looks like we will continue to be having lots of multiple-searching choices However, the next greatest risk is how we develop and maintain our human cognitive capability to distinguish between what we are being served and who is driving whom when we go seeking things out the OSINT-er still likes to do the actual human thinking of analysis, and arguably gets nervous when anyone or even anything else tries to do the thinking for them.