And, no, we’re not talking about the new features and functionality of their image search, which they announced on their company blog today.

Instead, we’re talking about something much more visible; namely, what you see on the Exalead homepage (www.exalead.com).

Previously, the homepage looked like your typical search engine homepage. It had the Exalead logo, a big search box, some links for different search types … you get the picture.

Today, the homepage is chock full of content hawking Exalead’s enterprise search solutions. Sure, there’s still a search box on the page. But it doesn’t work! If you enter a search term and hit the return key, all that happens is that you’re returned to the exact same page.

Initially, we thought this was a sure sign that Exalead was getting out of the general Internet search business. But the real story seems to be a bit more subtle than that. Exalead is still putting its general search homepage up for use if you go to country-specific sites such as www.exalead.fr or www.exalead.de. And you can get the content that used to be at the .com site’s homepage by going here.

So, based on what we can see right now, it looks like Exalead is shifting its focus away from the global Internet search market, and choosing, instead, to focus on certain country-specific search markets (and, of course, its enterprise search business).

Anyone with the inside scoop care to enlighten us on what’s going on?

(As always, feel free to track this development using Zuula blog search or news search. And, of course, we’ll continue to include Exalead’s globally-oriented web and image search results at Zuula as long as they remain available.)

Update: It looks like this posting got the attention of some people at Exalead, because the global homepage at www.exalead.com is now back to the way it looked previously. Either the company has re-thought its strategic shift, or there was a major mix-up in regard to the .com homepage. And I describe the mix-up as “major” because — if it was a mix-up — it was visible to the rest of the world for several days. The first mention of the different homepage content was several days ago — see this posting on the Exalead feedback website.

At some point, though, Accoona’s fortunes took a wrong turn. The quality of its search results didn’t meet expectations. There were accusations of inappropriate marketing tactics on behalf of the search engine and inappropriate sales techniques by affiliated websites. All of this — and more — ended up in a New York Times article last August that was far from flattering.

It wasn’t much of a surprise, then, when the Accoona announced late last year that it was halting its plans for an IPO.

It also wasn’t a surprise to most search industry veterans when word started leaking out over the past few months that Accoona was downsizing and considering alternative strategies for its business. Here at Zuula, we followed this news closely, since Accoona has been one of our web search tabs since not long after we launched our site.

Today, Accoona quietly unveiled its new strategy, and web search apparently is not part of that strategy. Instead, the new focus is on business search and news search.

As a result, we’ll be removing the Accoona web search tab at Zuula in the next day or two. At the same time, we’ll take a closer look at Accoona news search results to see if it makes sense to include an Accoona tab among the other news search options at Zuula. (Please feel free to share your ideas on that possibility in the comments below.)

As I’ve written before, it’s never a pleasant for us when we have to announce the removal of a search tab at Zuula. Still, Zuula continues to offer its users a rich variety of search options, including ten different sources for both web search and image search, and nine different sources for both video search and blog search.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Zuula has gotten a lot of recognition since it launched late last year, and we haven’t done nearly enough to let people know all the great things that have been said about it.

For our first installment in these regular updates, we thought we’d mention a nice pointer to Zuula’s blog search capabilities that appeared recently on KSTP Eyewitness News out of St. Paul, Minnesota.

KSTP’s regular “Internet Insite” news feature discussed the subject “Are People Blogging About You?” yesterday, and it listed Zuula’s blog search as one of the resources people can use to track how much they’re mentioned in the blogosphere.

The text of the news feature can be found at KSTP’s website here.

Update: The KSTP link mentioned above now contains the video of the news report as well as the related report on the website. Apparently, Zuula was not mentioned directly in the on-the-air news report, although it is mentioned on the station’s website.

Image search is a popular feature at Zuula, in part because search engines often return rather different image search results for exactly the same keyword. As a result, Zuula is an ideal platform for quickly finding exactly the kind of image you’re looking for.

Pixsy is a great addition to Zuula’s existing stable of image search providers, for several reasons.

First, the company is focused on visual search, and thus is constantly working to improve and expand the results it provides its users.

Second, Pixsy results are frequently complement, rather than duplicate, the results you’ll get from other image search engines.

And, finally, Pixsy does a great job at keeping its search results fresh. This is particularly helpful when you’re looking for images related to current events.

We hope you’ll try some image searches at Zuula using Pixsy, and we look forward to adding even more features and capabilities to Zuula in the coming months.

Until recently, the blog search options at Zuula were limited to Google blog search, Technorati, IceRocket blog search, and Topix blog search.

To these original four engines, however, we’ve added another five — for a total of nine (yes, nine) blog search “tabs”. The additional engines are Blogdigger, Bloglines, Blogpulse, Feedster, and Sphere.

Thus, if you’re looking for all the recent blog postings on a certain subject, there’s no better place to do your searching than at Zuula.

When you’re using Zuula blog search, you may find that some of the tabs return results a bit slowly. This is merely a reflection of the fact that the source engines often return results slowly themselves. Unfortunately, we can’t do much about this. We can only return results as fast as we get them, and some services simply take a while to report results (as many blog search users are painfully aware!).

It’s also worth mentioning that, for all included blog search engines, Zuula always displays blog search results. By default, some of the source engines return a mix of blog, news, and other types of search results. We have made certain, however, that the results we display are just the blog search results.

Finally, when you’re using Zuula blog search, you have the option of “dragging-n-dropping” tabs so that they are in your personally preferred order. If your preferred blog search engine is Sphere, for example, you can move its tab so that it’s the first in the row. That way, every time you do a blog search, you’ll see results from Sphere first.

(The ability to “drag-n-drop” tabs is available, by the way, for all search types at Zuula.)