I’m not a big user of metasearch engines; my complaint about them is that they tend not to have search engines I use. Further, I don’t find all the results aggregated and smashed together to be useful.

However, after playing with Zuula.com ( http://zuula.com ) a little bit, I might make an exception; I like the search engines it’s offering and it divides out results into tabs. Despite the fact that it’s in beta, it’s very fast and I didn’t have any problems while using it.

Zuula does metasearch in several different categories, including News, Images, Blogs, and Jobs (!!). The Web metasearch includes Google, Exalead, MSN, and Gigablast. Results from each search engines are broken out by tab. There’s a panel for recent searches on the left side of the results page that you can collapse; otherwise the results look like regular search engine results. The blog search is especially nice as it includes Technorati and IceRocket; add Blogdigger in there and I’ll have just one place to go for my blogging search results. (Google Blog search is supposed to be there as well but currently it’s giving an error.)

The tabs for each search type can be rearranged or customized (tabs removed, filters set, number of search results per screen specified.) There are also global preferences available and a limited advanced search.

I like the resources available here — Zuula has apparently skipped the idea of cramming every possible search resource into the engine and has instead focused on the good ones. I also like how easy it is to customize the interface. I’d like to see a couple more engines for blogs, and maybe a general resources searches that uses Wikipedia and other reference sites. All and all, though, nicely done.