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.

One of the things we’d like to start doing here at The Zuula Blog is update our readers now and then on all the different places Zuula is being talked about on the web, in print, and on the airwaves.

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.

For those of you who regularly use Zuula to search for images, you’ve probably noticed an important new addition to Zuula’s capabilities. Zuula image search now provides access to image search results from Pixsy.

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.

If you haven’t checked out Zuula’s blog search capabilities recently, I suggest you do. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at the many different blog search engines Zuula now offers.

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.)