Using Multiple Search Engines

I do my research/surfing on a Linux (Ubuntu) system, with FireFox as my browser. I use and love the tab feature in FireFox. When you are bookmarking one of the choices is bookmarking all the tabs you have open into a new folder. As you are surfing you can open every page in a folder onto a separate tab with one click. I have one folder with twelve search engines and two wikipedia pages. The plan was that at the start of a search I would pop open the folder, enter my search terms in Google, copy and paste into the other eleven plus wikipedia, and magically get better results than with one engine alone.

It doesn't happen that way. Twelve engines is a lot of pasting. Six of the engines are meta search engines which combine the results of two or three other primary engines. I have used the group search folder the way I planned a few times. Starting with twelve pages open, then opening every interesting result in a new tab. I quickly run up to thirty to fifty tabs open. This was two, maybe three months ago. Today I couldn't tell you if search engine two through twelve had any fantastic results that I would have hated to miss. I don't think so.

My habit was and is to start with Google only and if I need better/different results then refine the search string. Yesterday I setup a folder with the five primary engines and Clusty a meta search engine. We will see if I use it any more than the twelve engine folder. I will use the folder a few times this weekend and write up and post the results.