I’ll write more about all the changes in separate postings over the next week or two, but I thought I’d give everyone a “heads up” now.

First, we’ve finally added video search to Zuula.  Forget about doing video search anywhere else on the web.  Zuula now gives you access to results from nine different video search sites.

Second, we’re launching the Zuula search toolbar.  This makes it even easier to use Zuula for all your web search needs.

Finally, we’ve added a new blog search option, Blogdimension.  Blogdimension is doing great work providing quality blog search results, and we’re very pleased to offer their blog search results at Zuula.

Please feel free to let us know your thoughts on the changes … especially if you find any glitches that made it past our testing efforts.  We always appreciate feedback.

Technorati Tags: Zuula, video search, search toolbar, blog search, Blogdimension

Oh how I hate to write postings like this one …

Those of you who use Zuula for blog search have probably noticed that Zuula’s Feedster tab has been a bit of a problem child the past few weeks.  Clicking on the tab inevitably brought up a message saying that Feedster results were unavailable.

The reason this message kept coming up was because Feedster simply wasn’t generating blog search results anymore.  Indeed, sometime in early November, Feedster put up a notice on its home page saying “Feedster is changing … We’ll be back up soon with exciting news.”

Well, we’ve been waiting for the “exciting news.” And waiting.  And … nothing has happened.

So, to avoid confusion and unnecessary search delays, we’ve made the decision to remove Feedster as a blog search option at Zuula.

We hope this will be a temporary measure, and that Feedster will be back again soon.  In the meantime, Zuula users will have to live with only eight — yes, just eight! — blog search options, rather than the nine we’ve had until recently.

If you have any insights about what has been happening with Feedster, or if you would like to suggest other blog search engines we should include at Zuula, feel free to leave your news or suggestions in the comments below.

Technorati Tags: Zuula, blog search, Feedster

One of the top sources of information about Internet research is ResearchBuzz, a website that “provides almost daily updates on search engines, new data managing software, browser technology, large compendiums of information, [and] Web directories …”

ResearchBuzz’s reporting is so widely respected that, when the site gave Zuula a positive review earlier this year, a potential investor called our offices and said “Well, you guys have officially made it; you’ve been written up in ResearchBuzz.”

Given ResearchBuzz’s clout, you can imagine how pleased we were to see today that the site had some more positive comments about Zuula.  In an article about the blog search engine Feedster, ResearchBuzz wrote:

“For blog search, I find myself using Zuula more and more.  There is a amazing lack of overlap between engines…  IceRocket is not Bloglines is not Technorati is not Google Blog Search, etc.  Zuula serves up results quickly with an easy-to-use interface.”

We couldn’t agree more.

Thanks ResearchBuzz!

Technorati Tags: Zuula, ResearchBuzz, blog search

We’re never happy when we have to reduce the number of search options available to Zuula users, but sometimes we simply don’t have a choice.

Earlier this year, we were pleased to have a chance to add Amfibi to our portfolio of general web search options.  Amfibi, which is based in Spain, has been around for a number of years, and we liked the fact that its web search results were often quite different than those available from many other search engines.

Earlier this week, however, Amfibi’s servers suddenly stopped serving up search results.  We had hoped this would be a temporary problem, but it’s persisted now for a number of days.

Thus, to prevent any confusion created by the lack of Amfibi results at Zuula, we’ve decided to remove Amfibi from Zuula’s web search tabs.

We hope Amfibi’s downtime is just temporary, and that it will be up and fully operational again sometime soon.  And, if and when it does come back online, we’ll reactivate its tab at Zuula as soon as we can.

In the meantime, if anyone has any information about Amfibi’s status, feel free to post it as a comment to this posting.

Update (2007-07-26): We’re pleased to see that Amfibi has been back up and running now for several days.  However, the response times we’ve been seeing for searches are still quite high, so we’re going to wait and see how things develop before we add Amfibi back to the stable of web search options at Zuula.

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