Another Cure for Search Engine Fatigue

Last week there was a report published on Search Fatigue showing that 72% of all individuals basically give up because they were unable to find what they were searching for. Margie did a great job on her blog post last week, trying to provide some insight on how to search smarter, but here is a way to search faster. Instead of using Google (or Yahoo) to do your search, then going to Yahoo after you could not find what you are searching for, there is a site that lets you search two engines at once, Polycola.com. The default settings are Yahoo and Google, but visitors can also search Live, Ask, Dogpile, AltaVista and AOL via a simple dropdown. It is also possible to search just the web, images, videos, news, shopping, directory, answers or blogs by clicking on the appropriate circle. The results are then shown splitscreen. One of the pluses is that the results are focused more on the natural search results, not the paid listings.
This, unfortunately does not help searchers search smarter or help “the search engines read your mind” but hopefully looking at two results at once will help the user at least be able to finetune his searching and find what they are looking for sooner before they give up and walk away.