There is a metacrawler type script available at http://www.chatologica.com which allows you when you purchase the extra modules to search through yahoo, excite, altavista, infoseek, hotbot and I think some others.
They don't charge anything for the basic altavista metacrawler for I think demonstration purposes, but do charge $35.00 for the extra modules.
What I have done, is to purchase all the available modules so that my metacrawler searches all the available modules(search engines that they have available).
Then on my site the person enters their search term, and if anything is found in Links, it displays them first, with a link like yahoo, that says go to website matches, which is a link using the <%terms%> to the metacrawler script.
If no search results are found using search.cgi by
Gossamer Threads, then the search_results_error.html file is basically just a metarefresh tagged page that links to the metacrawler script again using the <%terms> in the url so that it only waits their 0 seconds then the search goes to the metacrawler script so that their is always some output.
I'd also be really happy if anyone comes up with any additional modules for their metacrawler that they don't already have available as we have already purchased all the modules they have and have requested additonal modules, only to be told by them, that they don't have time to do anymore modules right now, and will "try" and write some additional modules in the future. Which to me reads, "thanks for purchasing our product, but bugger off, we have no intention of making any more modules" as we have requested additional modules on about 3 occasions since we first purchased the metacrawler script from them.
Hope this helps.
Visionary
[This message has been edited by Visionary (edited April 04, 1999).]
