  Another type of Web search engine is a meta search engine, which, as its name suggests, draws from the results of multiple (specialized) search engines and then combines and re-ranks the results. One of the first, and perhaps most popular, meta search engines in the mid-to-late 1990s was HotBot (Wall 2011). Meta search engines had a much more important role to play during the early years of the Web. As search engines improved and became more sophisticated, the need for meta search dramatically declined. Today, most general purpose (horizontal) search engines, such as Google and Bing, are able to return the same level of ranked results (as meta search engines once did), via their aggregation schemes. In fact, the founders of Google have described their search engine as an “aggregator of information” (Brin and Page 1998).