Zuula
I have to shake my head in wonder each time I hear about a new search engine: it has to be almost the best example of chutzpah in the world
Zuula is the most recent one I’ve heard about. (Thanks to Research Buzz.) The move here is the meta move, which is popular with competitors: take the high ground and encircle. But typical meta-search engine’s aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, munging together results from here and there according to often obscure recipes. Zuula’s advantage is that it searches six mainstream search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, Gigablast and Exalead) and then produces a results page that keeps things separate, providing you with tabs for each engine’s results. There is, then, no downside to using Zuula in a sense: Googlers will get their Goodies and more betimes.
You can, if you wish, modify things to an extent. You can reduce the number of search engines Zuula uses (but you can’t add your own). You can alter the number of results per page. And so forth.
Zuula, then? Maybe, I say.
The extent to which it can be customized is questionable. Unlike Copernic which lets you set results per engine at 250, Zuula is limited to 60. Response time is the same whether you adjust or not, which suggests to me that the underlying engine is doing the same thing.
If you set Copernic at 250 results per engine, and then run 12 engines simultaneously, it slows down massively. 45 seconds or a minute per search. But the trade-off is the quantity and depth of results.
And I’m not sure I want separate tabs. I actually like having the duplicates eliminated.