How does merging results from multiple search engines impact crawl budget?
I found this patent about merging result lists from several search engines at once. If Google or another major search engine uses this, does it affect how often pages get crawled or indexed from different sources? Wondering if having content show up in multiple indexes ends up wasting crawl budget on duplicates.
Asked by norman.young
2 Answers
Merging search results from different engines doesn't really impact Google's crawl budget for your site. Google's crawl budget is based on your site authority, size, update frequency, and server response, not on whether your content appears in other indexes or meta search engines. If the same content is duplicated across different domains, Google might crawl all those domains but it's not 'wasting' your crawl budget for your original site. Just make sure you're using canonical tags if you syndicate your content, so Google knows which version is primary. The patent sounds more about how results are displayed to users than about crawling in the first place.
Merging results from multiple search engines, like what you saw in the patent, doesn't actually impact your crawl budget on Google. Crawl budget is set by Google based on your server resources, internal link structure, sitemap, and overall site health, not by whether pages show up in other search engines like Bing or DuckDuckGo. I've never seen Googlebot increase or decrease crawling activity just because content is indexed elsewhere. If you've got duplicate content on your own site or syndicating with no proper canonical tags, that can hurt, but not merging indexes from search results. For roofers, what really matters is keeping the site structure tight, using internal links, and making sure Google can fetch updated pages fast. Focus on that, not what Yandex or Bing is showing.