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!

We’re never happy when we have to reduce the number of search options available to Zuula users, but sometimes we simply don’t have a choice.

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.

One of the things we’d like to start doing here at The Zuula Blog is update our readers now and then on all the different places Zuula is being talked about on the web, in print, and on the airwaves.

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.

For those of you who regularly use Zuula to search for images, you’ve probably noticed an important new addition to Zuula’s capabilities. Zuula image search now provides access to image search results from Pixsy.

Image search is a popular feature at Zuula, in part because search engines often return rather different image search results for exactly the same keyword. As a result, Zuula is an ideal platform for quickly finding exactly the kind of image you’re looking for.

Pixsy is a great addition to Zuula’s existing stable of image search providers, for several reasons.

First, the company is focused on visual search, and thus is constantly working to improve and expand the results it provides its users.

Second, Pixsy results are frequently complement, rather than duplicate, the results you’ll get from other image search engines.

And, finally, Pixsy does a great job at keeping its search results fresh. This is particularly helpful when you’re looking for images related to current events.

We hope you’ll try some image searches at Zuula using Pixsy, and we look forward to adding even more features and capabilities to Zuula in the coming months.