Accoona — not a noise similar to a sneeze but a search engine with problems — has been around for a year. In New York recently Accoona announced that it is going to try hard to get into the Chinese market. It is apparently a major move, for Bill Clinton was there to do the honors.

This is a good move because some search engines are not overly popular in China and Accoona has a 20-year exclusive partnership with Chinadaily.com.cn. This is the government news service and through this partnership Accoona expects 10 million hits a day from the Chinese user base. Which, I guess, is possible if not probable. When it reports a Top 25 search list from China it is always carefully ‘non-adult search queries’ on Accoona China (which I guess does not do very much), and the Accoona Search Bar on China Daily which is a major news page.

This link is sort of prominent but there appears to be no explanation as to what it does.

On the results which can be seen at the moment Accoona has little hope of becoming a major player anywhere else.

Much is made of it being a ‘fusion of Web, Business and News results into one clean and easy to use interface’. But, and this is double important, it does not tell you the date the item appeared and is thus, for a lot of work, pretty useless.

Company chairman Eckhard Pfeiffer (he was chairman of Compaq which is no longer with us but let us not make too much of that) said: ‘Accoona’s One-Click for ALLSearch is our latest innovation in Search Technology. It delivers web-search tools that heighten the results process; pointing exactly to what users are looking for, and, at the same time serving the global business community with unique, free to use search tools.’

First I am not sure what all that means. But if it means what I think it may mean then it doesn’t do what he says. Not that Eckhard is telling little porkies. He is just over-enthused. Yes, Accoona has a simple interface, about as simple as Google. No, it is not a one step process. It is precisely as many steps as Google. And it does not date the items which means that for serious research it is damn near useless.

What Accoona apparently does have is a database of 43 million companies which it claims is the biggest of its type in the world. Over 5 million of these companies are privately held companies in China. Which would be useful if solid information was given. But it is not. What you have is the sort of listing you will get in a Yellow Pages directory with a plus in the maps feature which allows you see where the company is. CNN, in a review, lambasted it.

This sort of thing: For example, when I did a business profile search on Coca-Cola Monday, the first result I got was for a Miles Ahead Entertainment, which runs the Coca-Cola Apollo Theater Academy. Next was Farmington Coca-Cola, a distributor of Coke products in Farmington, Maine. It wasn’t until the sixth search result that I got the actual Web site for The Coca-Cola Company of Atlanta, Georgia.

Accoona got quite sniffy about this. Jonathan McCann, an executive director with Accoona said, ‘Sometimes less relevant results will be served. We are busily focusing on internally prioritizing Fortune 1,000 companies for the rankings.’ Hold hard my good fellow. Are you telling us that Coca-Cola is not one of the Fortune 1,000 companies?

In which case you have been smoking those fat, funny cigarettes again and I am surprised at you. Businessweek got Amey Stone to try it. She reported: Click on an infinity symbol next to a company name and an info-box pops up with its address, contact information, sales, and number of employees. There’s only one problem: My attempts turned up some bizarre answers, like the information that McGraw-Hill (MHP), owner of BusinessWeek, has between one and four employees. McGraw-Hill actually has more than 16,000 employees. Most of the terms used to describe aspects of the search engine are PR nonsense — SuperTarget Your Search will do as an example.

It claims it uniquely allows you to use filters. I know of no search engine that does not let you do that. We are told the name Accoona is derived from the Swahili phrase, Hakuna Matata, which means ‘don’t worry be happy.’ (You may remember it from The Lion King.) I am not sure the shareholders are going to be able to use that as a motto.

It has been available in China since December 2004; and was launched elsewhere last year. As of now I do not know of anyone outside of China who uses it as a main search engine. Perhaps they should have called in NearGoogleClone. Then we would have known what we were getting.

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, December 20th, 2006 at 6:31 am under Internet, Web2.0.

Read more entries by Gareth Powell.
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