Why Zuula May Be My New Favorite Search Tool
Thursday, July 17th, 2008
A couple months ago, I stumbled on Zuula and tonight I realized I am using it more and more as my main search tool NOT only when I want to get a quick feel for how much traction a client’s marketing effort is getting online, but for most searches. Rather than needing to go to lots of sources to query results, Zuula is a fast way for me to get a snapshot overview of buzz volume and intensity. I can easily use the same advanced syntax I use regularly, but do it on all major engines, plus blogs, video, images and more…at one time and right from one common interface on Zuula.
Zuula is a meta search, which isn’t anything new because others like Dogpile and Mamma have been around a while. Some might call it an aggregator, but technically it’s not, because it provides results from each search engine separately. And that’s what I really like about it. Unlike Dogpile that mashes all the results from various sources together on one page, Zuula presents the results in tabbed format. So I can just click on each of the tabs and get the results I need. And it does blogs, video, images, news and jobs as well as web. To me the advantage of Zuula’s tabs vs Dogpile’s mashup is that I can quickly discern potential volume and reach because at a glance I can tell if Google results are heavier than MSN or vice versa.
Other things I like are:
- It keeps a history of my recent searches which helps with tracking.
- All ads are pushed to the right to clearly distinguish paid results from organic. It doesn’t have the sponsored in-line results like most aggregators.
- If you are looking for images, the image search lets you see thumbnails directly from the image searches on Google, Yahoo, Live, Photobucket, Picasa, Flickr and more.
- It is simple, and I really like the interface.
And most of all….tonight I did in 15 minutes what it use to take me 90 minutes to do. Which rocks!
The only downside is Zuula is harder to type than Google.