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!

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.

No, Zuula hasn’t been featured (yet!) on the front page of CNET or the PC Magazine website. And, no, the Wall Street Journal hasn’t (yet!) published an extensive review of our service.

But Zuula has been mentioned in a wide range of other places. Library and Information Science News posted a short notice about us, which led, in turn, to related articles at a Japanese website and a French website. Several blogs mentioned the Zuula launch, including David Badertscher’s blog over at the New York Supreme Court Criminal Term Library. And a number of people have bookmarked Zuula at del.icio.us.

These and other results of our efforts to “get out the word” about Zuula have led to a significant increase in the number of people using the service. More than 10 times as many people are visiting Zuula each day than was the case just a week ago, and the number of visitors continues to climb.

So, to all of you who are new to Zuula, we’d like to say “welcome!”. We hope you’ll like what you see as you try Zuula out. We think you’ll find Zuula to be a better way to search the Internet, and we look forward to your feedback about the service.

We’re very happy, of course, to have reached this milestone. We celebrated a bit yesterday at our offices here in Princeton, and there are a lot of smiles and laughter at the office this morning.

There’s good cause for celebration. Zuula has evolved into a very powerful and very useful search tool. Developing that kind of tool has taken a lot of hard work, so the sense of accomplishment among those on the Zuula development team is well deserved. We all should extend our congratulations to them.

The team won’t be celebrating long, however. There are plenty of additional capabilities and features we have on our development roadmap, and we’re anxious to get them implemented and available to our users.

In the meantime, if you haven’t used Zuula yet, do so. Make it your go-to search tool for a week or so. If you do, I’m convinced you’ll find it hard to go back to any other search site.

And check back here regularly for information about Zuula. We’ll issue press releases, of course, whenever we reach a major milestone. But you’ll find this blog to be an excellent source for more frequent updates about Zuula’s features and other important information related to the service.