Wednesday, 13 October 2010

Zuula - new interface and de-duplication

Zuula (http://www.zuula.com/) has a new interface and a new feature. Zuula provides an interface to many different search engines organised by type. Simply enter your search strategy, click on the type of information you want (web, image, news etc) and then click on the tabs of the search engines one by one to see their results. It is a quick and easy way to run a basic search through several tools in succession.

Zuula's new interface is slicker and now automatically de-duplicates web search results. The first in the list is Google and you will notice that the results are numbered. Click on your next choice and you may notice that the numbered results do not start at number one.  At the top of the results list there is a plus sign and the text "Why minimized?" Zuula compares the results with your previous choice and "minimizes" duplicates under the plus sign. To see those results, click on the plus sign.


The other search types do not seem to support de-duplication but some are pulling in additional search features on the results page. For example images offers size, content (face, photo, illustration, line drawing) and colour. Some of the blog options offer restrictions by date (anytime, last day, last week, last month, last year).

You can change the order of the search engines under Preferences and also increase the number of results per page to a maximum of 60.

If you haven't tried it out already give Zuula a go now.
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2 comments:

  1. Boris22 October 2010 at 18:12

    Thanks, Karen, for letting your readers know about Zuula's upgrade. We appreciate your spreading the word.

    Just to clarify, the de-duplication ("dynamic pruning") feature is turned on by default not just for web search, but also many of the other search types, including image search, news search, and blog search. It's not quite as apparent for news search and blog search, however, because the different services don't return as many duplicates. Also, for image search, we implemented the de-duplication in a slightly different way, involving shading of the duplicates instead of actual removal of the duplicates.

    You can see an example of de-duplication for image search by doing a search on your own name, "karen blakeman" (without the quotation marks).

    Also, your readers also might want to know that our upgrade introduced continuous scrolling of search results across all search types, making Zuula the only search site that currently offers that approach across all search types.

    All the best,

    Boris.

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  2. Karen Blakeman22 October 2010 at 18:24

    Hi Boris,

    Many thanks for the clarification on the de-duplication feature.

    Zuula is very popular with people attending my search workshops so it is good to see it is being developed further.

    Karen

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