Combine the Powers of MSN, Google, and Yahoo!
It goes without saying that the world of search engines is heavily dominated by Google, but at the same time, it’s obvious that while Google typically provides some of the best results, they’re far from perfect. After all, how can you possibly trust a search engine that doesn’t have this blog as the number one result for “John Chow.” In this way, it could be better to look into a meta-search engine like Atnio. Here is their review.
Meta Search Engine for Mega Results
It’s obvious enough where the people behind Atnio got their inspiration for creating the world’s most powerful search engine. Unlike Google, however, Atnio does not have a mega-sized database of its own, relying instead on the amalgamated results of several search engines. For those of you who don’t know, this is the very definition of a meta search engine.
It’s a matter of perspective how you would view the search engine results. When you enter the search term “John Chow” in Google, you get 946,000 results. By contrast, when you perform the same search on Atnio, you get served up with “about” 17,400,000 results. That’s nearly 18 times the results, but realistically, you’ll only look at maybe the first 50 or so. You might not even navigate beyond the first page of results.
On a side note, John Chow dot Com sits on top of the Atnio SERP (search engine results page) for “John Chow”, in case you’re wondering.
Looks Like Google, Complete with Ads
From the user interface to the layout of the results page, the Atnio meta search engine looks an awful lot like Google. The main page has a blue background, but when you get to the results, it reverts to mostly white. Moreover, depending on the keyword search term, you may also get served up with sponsored results on the right. Atnio isn’t nearly as big as Google, so they don’t have as many advertisers.
The aesthetics will feel familiar, but the Atnio ads are not bid-based. Instead, getting in on the “sponsored results” comes in at a flat fee of $7.50 a month. This gets you a single listing and you can enter up to 8 keywords or keyword phrases. This effectively eliminates the concern over click fraud, just like the flat rate advertising on John Chow dot Com.
Online Bookmarking
One feature that sets Atnio apart from other meta search engines (and search engines in general) is what they call “My Folder”. This is where you can save any searches that you have done. When you conduct a search on Atnio, you can click on any of the “save result” links to save the search in My Folder. This saves the actual link, as well as the search that brought up that result.
From My Folder, you can send selected listings to any email address, assign a personal rating (out of five stars), and add a personal note, as well as delete individual entries (of course). This can come in pretty handy, but it’s a little strange that Atnio does not appear to have any sort of registration process for this service. Instead, it looks cookie-based.
Pictures, Videos, and News
Beyond the usual text-based search, you can also use Atnio to search for images, news, and videos. The pictures come from all over the web, whereas the video results seem to come only from YouTube and Yahoo! Video. To be a better meta search engine for video, it would have been better if Atnio also included popular sites like Revver, Google Video, and so on.
It’s nice seeing thumbnails for the videos, but the rest of the information is severely lacking. It wouldn’t take much to pull something as integral as the video’s title. Otherwise, users are simply guessing the content of the video based on a single frame.
Is Meta Really Better?
I appreciate the value of Atnio’s My Folder functionality and the relatively inexpensive sponsored results, but I have my gripes too. The image and video results could use a little more information, and it’s a little disconcerting for parents that the family filter is switched off by default. Moreover, the very name of the site — Atnio — is easy to forget. It’s easy to mistake it for Antio, Antoi, Atnoi, and so on.
So, what’s my answer to the question above? I’m going to go with “Not really.” Atnio has done a good job with creating a meta search engine, pulling results from at least six different search engines (Google, MSN, Ask, Fast, Yahoo!, and Entireweb), but there’s not enough here to pull me away from relying on the big G just yet.
- Posted in Reviews, The Net
- 61 comments what's your take?
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Free advertising for Hadouken and Super Smash Brawls? No wai!
Reply to this commentCombining results on the database of other search engines. Wonder what is the target of these folks even tho their name is lovely and memorable.
Reply to this commentI just love this SE all my pages in top results as it should be!
Reply to this commentThat everyone would like it.
Reply to this commentInteresting!
Who knows… maybe they might be able to improve on a few things here and there and become the next Google and maybe (just maybe) overtake the Big G someday. 
I personally like the way the information is organized although I am not too happy that my name doesn’t show up higher up in the results
Congrats and Best wishes to them and to you John for the good review.
Reply to this commentOops… sorry. I noticed after posting that the review was done by Michael and not John. Good review Michael
Reply to this commentHow can Atnio take over Google if they use Google’s database?
Reply to this commentAh well some how they will do it
just kidding. In either case starting a new search engine when you have in the top list search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN is tough, considering tho that those are just the top 3 and we yet have to name Ask Badu etc etc..
Reply to this commentI personally believe the era of the Meta Search engines had long passed us. It’s an effort worth the appreciation to create Atnio, but as Michael said, I too am a bit reluctant to pull away from the big G just yet.
But I believe Atnio would have done better if they didn’t try to follow Google’s formula in aesthetics. And the non-descriptiveness of the video search makes it completely useless.
Appreciate the honesty of the review!
Reply to this commentThe reluctancy is really based on traffic numbers. If they had the traffic of Google, or even MSN, then more would jump on. Not saying it can’t happen, but it will take time, which is in small supply on the web.
Reply to this commentAtnio seems exactly like what it is — a regurgitation of what’s already out there on the web.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a Yahoo user, MSN user, or Google user, they all use different algorithms and each has its own strengths and weaknesses, but each of them individually serves their users well. Does anybody really need 18 million results when quite honestly most people only browse through a few pages of results?
Noble effort, but ultimately in my personal opinion, re-inventing the wheel.
Actually, it’s not re-inventing the wheel as it is just a meta tool. It’s like adding a spoke to a wheel that already works.
Reply to this commentInteresting, however I very rarely stray from Google.
Reply to this commentSame here…
Reply to this commentMany people don’t thats why they hold such a large market share
Reply to this commentI’ve tried it, my website is on 1st placing also.. haha maybe not popular…
Reply to this commentLooks fine to me.
Reply to this commentHey John… Nice post… But Atnio still doesn’t look better then Google, Yahoo or MSN to me.
Reply to this commentneat, but I’m sticking with google since it’s conveniently located at the top right corner of firefox, no need to additional plugins or clicking on the pulldown menu to go to some other engine
Reply to this commentWhen I was reading I kept calling it Antio in my head. I wish they’d make the search result page a bit more nice.
Reply to this commentGreat post! In depth, thorough, and very straight forward. I agree with most that Google is still King. It’s convenient and effective. I doubt it will have any real competition for years to come.
Reply to this commentGoogle is still my all time favorite search engine.
I checked out Atnio’s search engine and I didn’t get as many search results as I did with yahoo. Great Review Michael!
~Katie
Reply to this commentYea google would prob be the top on my list as well. why switch when google gets the job done just as well?
Reply to this commentThats the bigger point. But remember, people said the same about Google when Yahoo had their stuff together!
Reply to this commentThe only positive i see here is it will maybe help Google…
Reply to this commentIf Google didn’t have anybody trying to compete with them, they wouln’t need to make themselves better.
It will be good surely.I
ndividually these Search engines are threat to each other.But now there is someone to threat them all.
Reply to this commentAre there really any scope of new search engines?
Reply to this commentI have never heard of Antio before. Like some of the other guys here, I still prefer Google. I’ll still go check it out, you never know when it will come in handy.
Reply to this comment~Terry
Amazing, JohnChow.com comes up first for the term ‘john chow’ now there’s a novel idea. Are you listening Google?
Reply to this commentThats because they pwned him
Reply to this commentI used DogPile a while back. This site looks to have more Web 2.0 features, but as mentioned above does rely on the results of other engines.
Hopefully they will take advantage of the major SE results and apply their own algorithm in presenting the results.
Michael
Reply to this commentHow about CHACHA?
Reply to this commentThat service really sucks.
Reply to this commentevery talk about johnchow.com coming up for keywords john chow ….
… well he is up there for the keywords he got penalized by google…. “Make money online” keywords keep him at the top tooo … 
… Nice review Michael , and hey john my entrecard add matches your site’s background … how about keeping it there permanently 
Reply to this commentwhat do people mean when they say meta? like the stuff in the html document such as keyword and description?
Reply to this comment“Meta data” is “data about the real data, but not the real data itself”. For example, my website http://ww2db.com has World War II information, like actual descriptions of the battle of Iwo Jima. My meta keyword may say “world war ii, iwo jima, us marines”. These keywords are descriptions of my content, but not the content itself. The content says “the battle of Iwo Jima is a big invasion conducted by the US Marines and supported by the US Army blah blah for many paragraphs”.
Now, on this topic, “meta” also means “not the real thing itself”. This search engine does not have the indexing algorithm, infrastructure, data centers, etc. behind it like Google, Yahoo, etc. Instead, bluntly put, Atnio steals Google results and Yahoo results, perform its simple sorting algorithm on the fly, and display it to the users. It’s not a real search engine; it is simply a way to display results of existing search engines. It is only the presentation layer; there is little to be called “engine”. So it’s not the search engine itself, it’s a meta-search engine.
Did I confuse you even more?
Reply to this commentYou just contradicted yourself throughout your comment. Basically they did a great job and they look and have better results than the other meta-searches.Overall they did a good job and eventually they will take over as one of the top meta-searches and then competing with the (big g) in time to come.For those critisizing above this comment you all said the same thing when google came out and msn amd yahoo.
Reply to this commentYou didn’t confuse them but basically proved that they did a good kob as a metasearch. Two thumbs up for Atnio and their probably getting better as we speak !?!?They might end up putting the others out of their misery. Those that knock it who say the G is king , you all critisized the big ones before you chose to go with them. RIGHT
Reply to this commentThis one is going places unlike others http://ww2db.com …. NEED I SAY MORE
I think this is probably a great service, but even as much as I detest Google, I’m probably not going to use it.
Reply to this commentWhy?
Reply to this commentInteresting….it doesn’t look that bad, but google is nice and clean and I’ve been using it so much, and it works for me, so I doubt I’ll stop using it.
Reply to this commentFunny that you should write this article today. Last night I posted a blog on Why MSN search is so bad .
Nice review and always nice to try something different out… but Google is my good friend, possibly sole mate?
Reply to this commentOut of frustration with Google -which had nothing to do with their search results- I had my own meta-search engine made => CipherSearch.com…hey,how about you guys checking it out for me?
Reply to this commentSure it’s out of pure frustration, or is there some profit incentive as well as I see the search page laden with ads?
Also, I seem to get only results from ask.com and nowhere else…
Reply to this commentYes there is a profit incentive…as I see your site has profit incentives as well
I’ll check on the results thing you mentioned
Reply to this comment@Caleb : Of course, otherwise why are we both on JohnChow.com ?
The keywords I used was “battle of iwo jima” and couple of other ww2 related terms. Only got ask.com. Maybe this is a hint for me to improve my ask.com SEO…
Reply to this commentThe other results come from Ebay,Amazon,and/or ClickBank depending on what you select… once you get the web page results,click on one of the radio buttons directly underneathe
Reply to this commentSounds awfully similar to MetaCrawler.
Reply to this commentSearch engines give quality & targeted traffic to website. It is happy to hear that $7.50 will do for a better search engine result fo one monh. Thank you.
Reply to this commentInteresting post, I’ll keep this in mind.
-Mike
Reply to this commentWhile I am receiving traffic from these sites, mainly google cause my site is only 1 week old today I do have 10,000 hits a day from sitehoppin.com powerdroppin.com and various social networks. if you have more baskets you can carry more eggs!
Reply to this commentYou are right john, google search on your name brings other site.. whereas it has to be yours.. but whatever, It seems google has some sort of grudge towards you, dunno, but that’s how I felt.
Reply to this commentanyway, atnio looks cool
“Some sort of grudge” was sort of John Chow’s own fault for testing the limits of Google rules, and he found where the limits were and stepped just one step over it and got himself penalized. Many of us feel for him and think Google was a bit harsh there, but it really all boils down to a risk John Chow took, knowing what the consequences are, and the risk did not pay off.
But hey, even though I think the grudge was mostly deserved, we all respect John Chow for always testing the waters with things so we can benefit. Thanks John
Reply to this commentMy SEO for Atnio is pretty bad
last link on a second page when you type hostingcow. If i compare this to google, it`s on the first page, 7th link.. not the best, but 2 days ago it was the first one on the second page..
Reply to this commentI had th same experience. “Battle of Iwo Jima”, one of my most successful key phrases, lands my http://ww2db.com page on that topic like #3 to #5 position range on Google. On Atnio I don’t even know what page I’m on, let alone position.
I wouldn’t worry about it. I don’t think Atnio is going to be too popular…
Reply to this commentPeter Chen your probably upset because you didn’t come out with atnio yourself . Why Aren’t you investing more money on ur site?????
Reply to this commentBy the way it looks like it’s much more popular than say another site!!!!
“Peter Chen your probably upset because you didn’t come out with atnio yourself ”
I’m not really upset since I don’t think it’s a good idea anyways
There had been many attempts at creating new presentations to Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. such as Yagoohoogle, Ms. Dewey, Dogpile, and now Atnio. Some became famous, but very few remained popular. Why? Because a search engine that does not build its own indexes can never be as good as the original. If today I build a meta search site that uses Google’s index, can I ever claim to be better than Google when I use their data to begin with? Hardly. Maybe some presentation improvements only.
“Why Aren’t you investing more money on ur site?????”
I invest anywhere between 20 to 40 hours a week working on http://ww2db.com , which includes research, content writing, and no more than 3 hours worth on marketing. That kind of time spent has been consistent since 2004. Is that enough “money” for you?
“By the way it looks like it’s much more popular than say another site!!!!”
Not sure if you’re referring to Atnio or my World War II Database. If it’s Atnio you’re referring to, we’ll wait and see. Perhaps I’m totally wrong; perhaps it might become a very popular search engine. My gut feeling tells me it won’t make it from my initial view of it. If you’re referring to my site, first of all, thank you
I’m not sure if I’d say it’s quite so popular yet, but it is carving a piece of the history enthusiasts market share, and is providing me a sense of accomplishment and profit all at the same time. Can’t beat that combination.
Reply to this commentDrink milk moomoo !!!! Instead of complaining about ur ranking do something about it instead of directing your grudge on the little guys.!?!!? ” Misery loves company “
Reply to this commentProbably will work and might improve things.
Reply to this commentlooks like a better designed search engine thats probably because i dont like google’s white background
Reply to this comment