It seems likely www.metacrawler.com is what that is since MetaCrawler is
based at U. Washington. However, from its FAQ, it says:
"The MetaCrawler is a free World Wide Web search service. The
MetaCrawler differs from other services in that it doesn't maintain any
internal database. Rather, it relies on the databases of Open Text,
Lycos, and others."
Hmm ... Could it be the user specified:
"Automatic Verification -- The MetaCrawler can download references
returned by other search services and ensure that those references are
both accessible and contain valid data. This is activated by either
phrase searching or by placing a + in front of a keyword (e.g. +Erik
+Selberg)"
And your site happen to have lots of the found documents?
One more thing, they say they're getting faster machines so it may get worse.
> This is worse than a student project - this is a 'service' being
> provided to the world as a better way to search.
And it IS better from the user's POV because it searches nine search
engines in parallel and consolidates the results. I use it all the time.
-- Patrick Lee <pat@patlee.org> <http://www.panix.com/~patlee/>