Accoona, A New Search Engine

The new search engine is called Accoona, and it got a lot of press attention because former President Bill Clinton helped launch it ( http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1736894,00.asp ). Bill Clinton gets to launch a search engine and Whoopi Goldberg had to flog Flooz ( http://www.clickz.com/news/article.php/226391 ). What a world.

Anyway. Accoona is available at http://www.accoona.com , and it features SuperTargeted Search, which makes me giggle helplessly. SuperTarget, away! Look out, Batman! It's SuperTarget!

I will not let my immaturity stand in the way of actually doing this review correctly. I tried searching for "Social Security." First strike on Accoona: it puts the sponsored results at the top, which is fine, but the only thing distinguishing the sponsored results from the Web results is a small line of gray letters. Second strike on Accoona: it tells me that my search for "Social Security" is too restrictive, and recommends Social Security instead. It's too restrictive and yet it gives me OVER TWO MILLION RESULTS. Does Accoona secretly want my head to explode? Hmm.

The search relevancy was okay. The trouble is that the results only include a title, excerpt, and URL (and it doesn't even appear to be the exact URL -- it's just the domain URL.) No size, no index date, no cache, no nothing. This is very 1995, and in an age where search engines provide a huge amount of information up to and including a page preview, this small amount of information in the search results is not going to do it.

The special search elements that Accoona supports are impressive-sounding, but upon inspection not that much is happening. It does AND, OR, and NOT. It does link:, site:, url:, and title: searches. But why would a search engine that provides such minimal search results provide CAPITALIZATION SEARCH? (Well, on second thought I'm not that impressed; a check between "three blind mice" and "thrEE BLIND mice" only changes the search results a little bit.)

You can also search for specialized meta-tag content. That means you can specify any type of meta-tag there might be and then search for keywords within this meta-tag. The syntax for that is tag:keywords. So if you were looking for baseball in the keywords tag, you'd search for keywords:baseball. I get 101,602 results for that as opposed to 101,511 for the search keywords baseball. What's going on here?

I decided to try their SuperTargeted business search, since that was so heavily advertised on the front page. I searched for Pizza Boston. The results I got were mixed. Yes. I got a pointer to a pizza place in Boston. I also got a pointer to a Pizza place in Chicago, a place that sells Pizza delivery bags, and a pizza place in Atlanta. There was a nice little pop-up icon that provides more information about the company in the results, and in this results screen the sponsored results are on the right while the organic results are on the left.

But still... Sorry Bill Clinton, I'm not impressed. The division between sponsored and organic results is not distinct enough, the results page lacks, and while the syntax sound good I wasn't able to make them have a real impact on my search results. Accoona needs more work.

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