The metasearch engine created by Aaron Flin and launched in November 1996 was Dogpile.
Flin developed Dogpile after becoming frustrated with the different results produced by individual search indexes. Instead of maintaining a single search index, a metasearch engine sends queries to multiple search services and combines or presents their results, giving users a broader comparison.
Dogpile began operating in November 1996. Its name is sometimes confused with MetaCrawler because both were metasearch services, but they were separate products. Dogpile’s goal was to reduce the chance that a useful page would be missed simply because one search engine’s index ranked or stored it differently.
The service changed ownership over time. Go2net acquired Dogpile in 1999, and InfoSpace acquired Go2net in 2000. In later years, Dogpile drew results from major search providers and other specialized sources. It remains a useful historical example of how early web search tried to combine competing indexes before large search engines became dominant.