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.

One of the top sources of information about Internet research is ResearchBuzz, a website that “provides almost daily updates on search engines, new data managing software, browser technology, large compendiums of information, [and] Web directories …”

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!