[photopress:clinton_bill_accoona.jpg,full,alignright]Accoona has announced in New York — it must be important Bill Clinton was there and the picture of him was taken at the meeting— is pushing hard to get into the China market. Accoona has formed a 20-year exclusive partnership with Chinadaily.com.cn. Through this partnership Accoona expects 10 million hits a day from the Chinese user base.
On the results which can be seen at the moment it has little hope of becoming a major player anywhere else. Much is made of it fusion of Web, Business and News results into one clean and easy to use interface. But 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) 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.’
But it doesn’t. Yes, it 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 1000 companies for the rankings.’
Which will be a lot of use to Chinese users. Most the terms used with the search engine are PR nonsense — SuperTarget Your Search will do as an example. It 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 launched Accoona. I do not know of anyone outside of China who uses it as a main search engine.
Source: China Daily
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