This paper promotes a new swarm-based metaheuristic called four directed search algorithm or FDSA. FDSA is designed as a directed search-based metaheuristic without deploying any neighbourhood search. It contains four directed searches that are carried out sequentially. Each search has its reference. These four references are the best member; the resultant of three shuffled members within the swarm; a shuffled member within the swarm; and the resultant of the best member, a shuffled member within the swarm, and the corresponding member. FDSA implements a strict acceptance procedure so that new solution is accepted only if it provides improvement. The investigation is carried out to evaluate the performance of FDSA in solving the 23 functions. FDSA is also confronted with five new metaheuristics: northern goshawk optimization (NGO), average subtraction-based optimization (ASBO), coati optimization algorithm (COA), mixed leader-based optimization (MLBO), and attack leave optimization (ALO). This work also investigates the contribution or dominance of each search in the context of finding the optimal solution. The result shows that FDSA is superior to all these confronters by consecutively outperforming NGO, ASBO, COA, MLBO, and ALO in the 17,13,11,18,and 11 functions. Its superiority is mainly in the high-dimension functions. Through investigation, there is no dominant search among the four directed searches in FDSA. Meanwhile, multiple search strategy is proven to improve performance significantly. On the other hand, the contribution of neighbourhood search is not significant.