Does that fact that running the same search on different search engines often results in wildly different results bother you?  It bothers us at iBraryGuy.  If you are like us, you probably will run an important search in various search engines just to make sure you did not miss anything.  This can be both cumbersome and time-consuming.  Well it could . . . until Zuula came along and made power searching a whole lot easier.

What is Zuula?  The name may sound odd, but we library types know better than to judge a book by its cover.  We judge it by its content and our contentment.  Give Zuula a try and you will see that it’s got some great features that are bound to make you happy.  Let’s start by saying what Zuula is not.  It is not a mere metasearch in the classic definition.  Though Zuula searches across various search engines, it does not simply aggregate and rank results into one list.  No.  It searches other engines and brings you individual lists that you can compare and contrast without running multiple searches or opening multiple windows.  In this regard, Zuula is really one part metasearch and one part time saver!

Zuula’s real power is not as much in its search (which is great!) but in its functionality and customization.  Run a search in Zuula and you will get a series of results tabs.  Each tab is a results list from a different search engine.  Simply click the tabs to compare and contrast the results.  Want to specify which engines are being searched and in which order?  No problem!  Zuula can be customised to poll only the search engines you trust and in an order ranked by you.  You can even set these prefernces by type of content being searched (web, images, video, blogs, etc.).  It does not take much to make Zuula work for you and save you a good bit of legwork and time.  Zuula even saves your most recent searches for you for easy recall.

In a world where web search has almost become ubiquitous to our daily lives, it is becoming increasingly difficult for a search engine to stand out from the crowd or compete with the major players.  Zuula, which is still in beta, is off to a great start.   More than just a fresh approach to metasearch, it is practical and powerful alternative to search engine overload!