Most people rely on the results from one or two search engines for their primary search needs.  Maybe you use Google as your primary search engine and jump over to Yahoo when you're not finding what you want.  Metasearches are special search engines that submit your search terms to a number of different places and return a combined list.

Our Featured Search Engine for the month of February, ixquick, is one such metasearch.

What makes ixquick a bit different is the way in which it displays search results.  For each search engine that ranks a site within its top 10 results for a given term, ixquick gives that site a star.  When you do a search for "yahoo", for example, the top result is a tie between Yahoo! Messenger and Yahoo! Mail.  The third result points to Yahoo.com.  At first you might think that's odd.  But what that really means is that more search engines point to Yahoo! Messenger and Yahoo! Mail as their top results than the main Yahoo website.

This kind of information could be very beneficial to website owners.  You probably know where you rank in Google.  Hopefully you know where you rank in Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com and some of the others.  With ixquick.com, you can get a quick snapshot of where you rank across a dozen search engines from one end of the web to the other.  What's more, each result tells you which search engines returned top results.  If you're not ranking high in one of the engines, it's easy to spot here.

In addition to it's unique ranking system, ixquick also features an international telephone directory, an image search, and a shopping comparison feature.

I was pleasantly surprised by the results ixquick returned.  It actually found sites and images that Google didn't.  And more times than not, it returned exactly what I was looking for with my sample searches.

ixquick has gone through some turbulent times in the past.  It was launched almost a decade ago.  But due to some management issues, the site went all but dormant for a while.  But it's been relaunched and, from what I can tell, is better than ever.