While the majority of our day-to-day searches are easily handled by our favorite search engine, there are always those intensive searches that have you jumping from site to site - or opening a series of tabs - to find a good cross-section of information on a given topic. Even once you've established a preferred workflow for this kind of comprehensive searching, it can be time consuming to run through the process.
Wouldn't it be easier if you could simply enter one query and have it run through a bunch of search sites?
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Of course it would. And that's what makes Search.io so appealing. It's a meta search engine that searches a variety of sites - grouped by topic - and displays them as tabs to help you find information more quickly and easily.
To use Search.io, simply enter your search term and select your specific area of interest. Topics range from the default "search engines" to "blogs" to "torrents." There's even a search for popular "Web 2.0" sites. And for the more voyeuristic types, there's a listing of the latest searches.
While some of the tab sets seem to be stretching it a bit - I'm pretty sure the last time I cared about finding information in Alta Vista or Lycos was some time in the last century - the concept has a great deal of potential.
In fact, I've already added a couple of the search options to my toolbar - like the people and social bookmarks searches - and I'm going to keep using them to see if they speed my searches. I'm sure that once I've been using the service for a while, I'll find some ways to employ creative queries that will streamline my searching even further.
To test drive tabbed search for yourself, visit Search.io.
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