Erik Selberg @ MetaCrawler: The Grad Student Who Searched Other Search Engines

If you need to find something on the Web, it's as simple as going to Google and typing whatever you're looking for. You don't even think twice about whether or not you'll get useful results. Heck, you don't even think twice about whether or not the Google webpage will actually load. But early search engines weren't nearly as reliable.

Before Google perfected web search, lots of search engines were trying to figure out the best way to help people find what they needed online, and they weren't always reliable. To help solve that problem, a graduate student at the University of Washington named Erik Selberg developed a different type of search engine. It was a search engine that searched other search engines -- a "metasearch engine" -- aggregating results across the different platforms and pulling them together in one place. For users, this meant if one search engine wasn't working or giving good results, they could still find what they needed.

Sure, the idea of a metasearch engine seems strange today, but MetaCrawler solved a critical problem in the early days of the Web. On this episode of Web Masters, you'll learn how -- and why -- Erik built it.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.