Perform and Return 2 Sets of search results

Hello, I am working on a site that makes heavy use of Custom Post types.
There are 2 main kinds of posts, Places and Events.

What I want to do is return results from a search, searching only the Places, this will be displayed in the left column. Then I want to return the search results for only Events, and return those results into the right column.

I see 2 ways to do this, I could perform one search, then sort the results by type in the page template.

But I would really like to be able to modify the query for each post_type individually, does anyone out there think is is possible?