Metasearch engine Zuula released a big update last week, what it is calling “Zuula 2.0”. It may be 2.0 but it’s still noted as being in beta; you can try it at http://zuula.com/.
My biggest complaint about using metasearch engines is that you end up seeing the same results over and over again. I’m jazzed to see that Zuula is conquering that with a feature called “Dynamic Pruning.” Here’s how it works. You do a search and get a result page that shows tabs for results from a variety of search engines including Google, Bing, Exalead, Gigablast, and Mojeek. The first tab, Google, shows all the engine’s search results. (You can use the Preferences option on the right of the search result page to change the order of the tabs.) The second tab, Bing, shows only those results which didn’t appear in Google.
The hidden results can easily be revealed with a click, and Zuula keeps each individual result’s order number so you can easily get a sense of where you are in the search results.
This means I can do a general-term Web search and quickly browse across several search engines’ worth of results without seeing the same three or four sites over and over and over again. That is exciting.
If you can’t think of anything to search for, Zuula can help you out there too with real-time search suggestions. Start typing “strawberries” and Zuula kicks right in (what the heck is a Strawberry Shortcake Makeover?) As far as I can tell, though, this new feature works only on the Web property of Zuula’s search.
Zuula does have several types of information to search, including Web (of course) Blogs, News, Jobs, and a new category called Tags. Tags searches seven collections, including StumbleUpon, Delicious, and Blinklist.
As I noted I don’t do a lot of metasearching because I find it extremely repetitive, but with that Dynamic Pruning feature, Zuula may just change my mind…
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Thanks, Tara, for letting your readers know about Zuula’s recent upgrade. I’m glad you like the new “dynamic pruning” feature that we’ve added.
That feature, by the way, is on by default not just for web search, but also for many of the other search types, including blog search, news search, and image search. It’s less apparent for those search types, however, for two reasons.
First, there isn’t as much duplication of results across the various search engines for the other search types. (That’s an interesting subject in and of itself, isn’t it?) This is particularly the case for news search, due, I think, to the large number of news sources out there and the different ways the engines select news links for display.
Second, we implement dynamic pruning a bit differently for image search. To keep the feature easy to understand for that search type, Zuula “prunes” images that already have been displayed by greying them out. You can see this in action by doing an image search at Zuula on the keywords “Tara Calishain” (with or without the quotation marks).
Your readers also be interested to know that, since the recent upgrade, Zuula offers continuous scrolling when viewing search results for any search type. No more clicking page numbers of the “next” button to view additional results. I believe Zuula is the only comprehensive web search site that offers this feature across all search types.
Best regards,
Boris.