Bot News
MetaBot.ru

By Brian Proffitt

Users of the World Wide Web, Americans especially, tend to forget the word "World" and assume that all things on the Internet are geared towards English and American culture. This is a huge conceit, which tends to make us overlook sites such as MetaBot, a Russian-built, Russian-oriented meta search bot.

MetaBear comes in two langauages, Russian and English. My working knowledge of the Russian language is very limited, consisting of "please," "thank you," and "which way to the dance club?", so I opted to stick with the English-language side.

The interface for MetaBot is very simple. You are given a choice of three search fields to use. The first search field will send your query to all the major Russian search engines, the second to several major Western engines, and the third will search FTP sites for individual files.

I entered several searches on each of these fields, and was pleased to see a good amount of information coming back to me in the search results.

Right now, the only issue I would have is with the site's speed. It is a bit slow to load and definitely on the slow side while doing searches. But I got the sense that this was more a product with the fact that my Web traffic was going across the entire planet rather than speed of the search engine itself. I would be interested to see how European visitors' spped on this site would compare.

Despite being slow, I think MetaBot is a good search engine overall, and certainly an excellent portal to Russian-specific information.