A Message To Web Site Owners

In case you have any doubts, MetaFind means you no harm. We do not scrape web sites - in fact, unlike search engine spiders, every time MetaFind visits you, it means a real person has performed a search. There's no robot involved, only an actual human being who you now have the opportunity to convert to a frequent visitor. We hope you'll welcome them, regardless of how they arrive. If you have any concerns, please share them with us - we want to be a welcome source of traffic to your web site, and will work diligently to resolve any issues that may arise.

Some of you are reading this because your web site is not available in MetaFind. Except in rare and fairly obvious cases, we do not make editorial decisions about which web sites are included. To the extent possible, we try to provide access to any searchable web site with potentially useful content, and allow users to decide for themselves who to visit.

It may be that in our own explorations, we somehow missed your web site. Due to time constraints, we simply were not able to visit, test, and evaluate as many sites as we would have liked. Our current database of over 5000 web sites took over two months to compile, and we had to stop in most cases when there was sufficient choice for the users, rather than complete an exhaustive survey. If we missed your site, please accept our sincere apologies, and send us an email - we'll be happy to get your web site added in an upcoming release. If your site does not seem to fit well within an existing Category or Search Group, please feel free to suggest new ones.

It may also be that your web site was not included for purely technical reasons. Unfortunately, we encountered quite a few web sites that we very much wanted to include, but were unable to reliably search. In order for a web site to be useable in MetaFind, it must be possible to search that site through a URL. This is the only requirement. It does mean, however, that if your web site takes a strictly form-based approach, encrypts or encodes search terms, requires captchas or memberships, or employs a variable ID string, then MetaFind users will be unable to search your web site. In most cases it should be easy to resolve such issues. No major change to your software should be required, just the additional ability to recognize a simple "query=target" type of parameter in a URL, and to pass that request on to your existing search facility. If you have departments that can be searched separately (for example Men’s and Women’s Clothing) multiple URLs are welcome.

If your site is included, but is not being successfully searched by MetaFind, please let us know so that we can get the problem fixed and restore access to our users. We retest sites on a regular basis, but this is a lengthy process, and it's always possible that we've missed a change in the way your site is searched. On occasion we also miss the fact that a web site requires some type of unique user or session ID, something that often requires a second, later test to discover. We regret that in such cases your web site may have to be removed from MetaFind's database until it can be searched without such an ID. Please note that this does not mean we're telling you not to use such ID's, but only that in order to be accessed by MetaFind users, there must also be an "entry" search URL that can function without one.

If you're wondering why you should care, please take a moment to read "The Future of Search". This is about more than MetaFind, which is, after all, just one small program. This is about you, and the people searching for you. Do you want to remain forever at the mercy of the Giant Search Engines? Do you believe that life under their rule will get better, or worse, as time goes on? MetaFind is more than just a program, it's an idea. If that idea takes root and flourishes, it may even help to lead to an entirely new way to search. Help MetaFind, and programs like it to grow - you have nothing to lose, and everything to gain.