Something is going on at the French general-purpose search engine Exalead.

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.

Although it never reached the search engine “major leagues”, Accoona was a serious minor-league player for several years. The service was launched almost four years ago at a major PR event attended by former president Bill Clinton, who reportedly carried out the first public search on the service. Investments totaling as much as $100 million apparently were made to ensure that the service was backed by the best technology (and, of course, marketing). And, if memory serves, the site even managed to garner a decent — if not earth shattering – amount of traffic in its first year or two.

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.

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.

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.