Smart Internet Search with Zuula and Mindset

This week I came across two new (-ish) but very cool ways to search the www. I simply must share these with you and so this week we’ll focus on sites that search the web.

Zuula.com This is a new metasearch engine that in my opinion is quite possibly the best metasearch eninge ever. It is particularly useful for images as it includes flickr.
Zuula allows its users to carry out Internet searches with a wide range of major search engines, returning results in a consistent interface that makes it easy for users to cross-check results across the different search engines.The user interface has “drag-n-drop” customizability (you can move around the tabs representing the different search engines), and there’s also a useful, collapsible, search history function.Many of our users like our service because it allows them to rely on their favorite search engine for most of their searching, while also giving them quick access to results from other search engines “when the searching gets tough”.-Zuula CEO

Mindset Have you ever been searching the net and wondered how you could get rid of the more commercial results and get right into the more informational ones? Yahoo mindset is your solution. It is ‘A Yahoo! Research demo that applies a new twist on search that uses machine learning technology to give you a choice: View Yahoo! Search results sorted according to whether they are more commercial or more informational (i.e., from academic, non-commercial, or research-oriented sources).‘ (from site)

Zuula and Yahoo Mindset, when used together can give you pretty amazing, useful search results. For example, I was searching for Kenyan football (aka soccer) on the web recently. Whenever I used one search engine on its own I ended up with search results that included sites that were clearly not on Kenyan football per se but justed ‘mentioned’ it. So I used Yahoo Mindset to search for Kenyan football aiming to remove all commercial results. But are the Yahoo results representative of what’s out there? The only way to find out is to search for Kenyan football using zuula and compare the Yahoo results with other search engines. I did this and felt happy with yahoo results on Kenyan football and proceeded to use Yahoo Mindset to filter out some of the commercial search results. Voila! I got what exactly what I was looking for: KenyanSoccer.

Searching the web is now actually fun and can even help you kill some time.