If you’re a regular user of Zuula, we think you’ll be excited by what you’ll find in this upgrade.  On the surface, the upgrade may seem like just a simple update to Zuula’s user interface.  But do a few searches, switch among the various search engine tabs, and you’ll see that Zuula is now a lot more powerful and convenient to use. 

Internally, we have been using the codename “Zuula 2.0″ to describe this new version of Zuula.  We think that those of you who know Zuula well will immediately understand why.

For those of you who are new to Zuula, we hope you’ll take some timeto learn more about the powerful search tool thousands of people around the world use each day.  We think you’ll be impressed.  Zuula is not just another ordinary search tool.

The press release announcing our latest upgrade contains most of the details about what’s new in Zuula 2.0.  Here it is:

Zuula Launches Powerful New Version Of Its Popular Search Service

- Zuula now makes it easier than ever to get the best out of all the top search engines by highlighting differences in results from different search engines. 
- The new version of Zuula also significantly increases speed and convenience with features such as continuously scrolling pages, a ‘Tags’ search type, and suggestions of similar websites.

Princeton, NJ – October 5, 2010 — Zuula LLC today officially announced the release of a major new version of its Internet search service, Zuula (www.zuula.com).  The new version adds a broad range of new features that make Zuula more powerful and more convenient.

Zuula has always made it easy to view search results from all the top search engines, including Google, Yahoo, and Bing.  Now Zuula goes a step further by automatically comparing results returned by different search engines for the same search, and then highlighting the results that are new to the user.

“We think users will be very excited about this new feature, which we call ‘Dynamic Pruning’,” said Tim Hunt, Zuula’s President.  “As always, users can get results at Zuula from their favorite, trusted search engine.  But when they don’t find what they are seeking with their favorite engine, Zuula enables them to check other search engines and have the results highlighted that they have not already seen.”

The newly released version of Zuula also adds real-time search suggestions and a new continuous scrolling mode for all search types.  With continuous scrolling, users can simply continue to scroll down the page for more results, rather than having to click on links for separate pages.  Although continuous scrolling is now the default viewing mode at Zuula, users still have the option of selecting traditional page-by-page viewing and having it be the default when they are at Zuula.

In addition to dynamic pruning, real-time search suggestions, and continuous scrolling, Zuula also has added a new search type and multiple new search engines to its existing search types.  The new ‘Tags’ search type includes eight new search sources, including social bookmarking and website recommendation services like Delicious and StumbleUpon.  The ‘News’ search type has been significantly expanded with six new search resources, including Digg, Reddit, and Slashdot.

“We have expanded to include almost sixty of the top search result providers in seven categories” said Dr. Hunt.  “Whether you are searching the Web, images, video, news, blogs, jobs, and now tags, with Zuula, you not only get results from your favorite search engine, but also from many other great sites that will help you find the results you are seeking.”

About Zuula LLC
Zuula LLC is a privately held company with headquarters in Princeton, New Jersey (USA).  Since its founding in 2005, the company has been dedicated to making it easier to find, organize, and use the wide variety of information on the Internet.

Additional Information
Image files with the Zuula logo and screenshots are available at the Zuula Media Kit page (www.zuula.com/help/media.html .)  Inquiries from the media are welcome at media [Email address: media #AT# zuulacorp.com - replace #AT# with @ ] or at Zuula LLC’s main phone number, +1 (609) 651-4790.

Image Credit: Dale Gillard at Flickr.

The upgrade can honestly be described as the most significant addition to Zuula’s capabilities since the service’s launch almost four years ago.

The full details of the upgrade will be released when the new version of Zuula is rolled out in the very near future.

For now, though, we can say that the upgrade involves new functionality, new search types, new search result sources for existing search types, and greater speed.  Together, these additions to the Zuula feature set should make Zuula an even more powerful — and convenient — search tool than it already it is.

Stay tuned!

P.S. – Remember, the very latest updates on what is going on with Zuula are available via our Twitter feed and at our Facebook page.

Most likely, the problem started occurring late last Friday.  However, the problem is strongly linked to how many users are being served by each server, and traffic at the Zuula servers is typically slower on the weekends than on weekdays.

So the problem didn’t really become apparent until this morning, once the normal weekday traffic started to kick in.

We believe we know the source of the problem, and we expect to have it resolved in the next several hours.  In the meantime, we hope the problem won’t create too much inconvenience for you.

If you encounter server response time issues or any other kind of problem while using Zuula, please let us know by emailing us at info [Email address: info #AT# zuula.com - replace #AT# with @ ].

Also, we try to post running updates of what is happening at Zuula via Twitter at http://twitter.com/Zuula.  You also can get updates at our Facebook page here.

Update (2:40 pm ET) - We have made some updates to the Zuula servers.  The updates should take care of the server response time issues that developed over the weekend.  If, however, you still experience any significant delays, please let us know.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.