How to make simple metasearch engine?

July 18, 2008 2:20 PM

I want to create a simple page that will query search engines of my choice (i.e. in the form www.z.com/?q=blah) and just concatenate the first page of results into one page. Is there any super-easy way to do this? It would be great if it looked pretty and/or was mobile-phone-friendly, too, but this is not necessary. Thanks.
posted by shivohum to computers & internet (5 answers total)

Well there's this.
posted by Pants! at 2:25 PM on July 18, 2008

Well, one very easy way would to to create a page with three iframes, each pointing to a search engine page. It's a dumb as a bag of rocks, but maybe it works for ya. Here's the code.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 2:33 PM on July 18, 2008

Thanks. Foci, I think that will work, but is there any easy way for me to change the query without having to edit the code every time? Any easy way to just change the query by altering the URL for instance?
posted by shivohum at 3:15 PM on July 18, 2008

I thought about that and updated the script. Basically, you enter a query into a text field and the script does the rest. But maybe you would like to change the search engines themselves too?
posted by Foci for Analysis at 3:20 PM on July 18, 2008

Thanks! I think I can change the search engines myself now going from your code... but very helpful!
posted by shivohum at 8:32 AM on July 20, 2008