When we put out the welcome mat for Zuula a little over a month ago, we didn’t realize just how many visitors would come bounding across the threshold. Wow! Thanks for the positive response!

The influx of new users has meant that we’ve been extra busy making sure Zuula can handle the additional traffic. True, the software and hardware infrastructure that brings you Zuula every day has held up extremely well. (Please don’t let those be famous last words!) But that doesn’t change the fact that we’ve had to do plenty of poking, tweaking, and hand-wringing to ensure Zuula’s uptime.

As a result, we’ve had much less time than expected to keep you posted about all that’s going on with Zuula.

We’ll try to make up for our “radio silence,” however, in the next few weeks. So watch this space!

Even though we opened Zuula to use by the general public over a month ago, we didn’t make much of an effort to publicize our launch until last week. At that point, we had finished adding some additional server capacity, and we’d also implemented some new features and technical fixes we wanted to have complete.

So, at that point, we decided to “push the ‘ON’ button.” We sent out our launch press release over the newswires. We reached out to some media outlets to make them aware of Zuula. And we generally started marketing Zuula much more actively than we had since the beginning of November.

The results have been gratifying. (Read on …)

Okay, we admit it. There are some other search services out there that are similar to Zuula. We weren’t the first to come up with the idea of offering search results from a number of different search engines, all at one website.

One key way that Zuula is different, however, from other “multi-engine” or “metasearch” websites is the way Zuula handles advertising.

When Zuula displays the results of a search, it clearly differentiates between paid advertising and actual search engine results. Paid advertising is either at the top, bottom, or off to the side of the actual search engine results.

In addition, Zuula shades the advertising on the top and bottom of the page, to help distinguish it from the actual search results, and there’s a dividing line between the actual search results and any advertising on the right of the page.

(Read on …)

One of Zuula’s features that’s just about impossible to miss is its ability to save a user’s search history. This functionality is turned on for every user the first time that they come to Zuula. It’s the feature that creates the list of “Recent Searches” that you see to the left of your search results (click on the thumbnail below to see an example of a Recent Searches list).

One use of the history feature is, of course, to keep track of the searches you’ve carried out. If you’ve ever carried out an involved search, using lots of keywords, then you know how easy it is to forget what searches you’ve carried out. The history feature helps you avoid that problem.

An arguably even more important use of the history feature is to re-do searches you’ve already done. To re-do a search listed in your Recent Searches list, just click on it, and Zuula will do the search again. (Read on …)