In the era before Google, there were several search engines in use which hardly anyone knows today (Altavista, WebCrawler, ...). The workflow you describe corresponds to a "metacrawler": it sends the request to several search engines, and displays all of the results. According to Wikipedia (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaCrawler[
^]) such Metacrawlers were developed already in 1994.
Do you remeber the era when we used Lynx or even Gopher for browsing the web?