Until now, search engine providers have tolerated parasitic metasearchers like MetaCrawler, Dogpile and Apple Computer Inc’s new Sherlock tool. A new release from Thunderstone Software could be about to change all that. Available free from Thunderstone, Webinator 2.5 lets webmasters build their own parallel metasearches, which send queries simultaneously to a group of search engines. By default, Webinator polls Excite, Infoseek, Inktomi, Lycos, Thunderstone and Yahoo. If it becomes popular, it could increase the burden on those sites without actually raising the hit counts on their ad banners. In the past, the search engines have arranged licensing deals with MetaCrawler, but if Webinator lets sites like it proliferate, the parasites might be hard to detect, let alone track down. For a metasearch engine to make itself look like a genuine user running Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer is a piece of cake.
