Which metasearch engine launched on July 7, 1995?

MetaCrawler launched on July 7, 1995.

MetaCrawler was developed at the University of Washington by graduate student Erik Selberg and professor Oren Etzioni. It was designed as a metasearch engine: instead of maintaining one entirely independent index, it sent queries to other search services and combined their results. That made it useful when early search engines had different strengths and coverage.

The project began as Selberg’s Ph.D. qualifying work in 1994. Its early infrastructure used four Digital Equipment Corporation AlphaStations and handled several hundred thousand queries per day, creating substantial bandwidth demands for the university. NetBot was later formed to commercialize MetaCrawler and related University of Washington projects.

A common mix-up is Dogpile, another well-known metasearch engine that appeared later. MetaCrawler also changed ownership and direction over time, passing through Go2Net and InfoSpace before eventually becoming associated with System1. Its 1995 launch date identifies the original service, not one of its later relaunches or redirects.