Is there software that I can install to perform search on many search engines/portal at the same time.
I'm doing a lot of research and I would need to check on google, bing, yahoo and so on at the same time.
There are services on the web for that kind of thing, aptly named Meta search engine. Wikipedia has a list.
If you want to search each of the search engines individually you could use Shortmarks (a service I created). To search any number of search engines at once from the address bar, create a bundle and give it a keyword of say, s. Then you could type: !s <search phrase>
in the address bar to open each of the search results pages in a different tab.