July 6, 2006

The Accoona search engine is already available in English and in the Chinese language, but Accoona has now launched in Europe as well.

A nice feature about this search engine is, if you type www.accoona.eu in your Internet browser you will (depending on where you live in Europe) be forwarded automatically to a home page adapted to your local language. This works by simple IP address recognition of the country where you live.

New languages available are German, French, Dutch, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. However, not any Scandinavian languages as available as of yet.

Accoona was developed by an American company with strong connections in China. Accoona has a twenty-year contract with the English-language Chinese newspaper China Daily delivering search services to their website.

Accoona claims they are using artificial intelligence in order to improve search results. Nevertheless, we found several irrelevant listings on the first results page using various search queries.

The search engine results pages are of the traditional linear kind, but lacks links to cached copies of pages.

In addition to regular Internet search facilities, there is a business search service delivered by Dun & Bradstreet and a news feed delivered by Moreover. As a side note, Moreover is used by giants like MSN and a few others.

On the right hand side you will find a section with pull-down menus called SuperTarget. For a large number of search queries, the alternatives given in this section may be more confusing than helpful.

The best variants of this are those where you can limit your search results to a particular language or site. Numbers within brackets tell you how many search result pages are found in the language or website selected.

If you use more than one keyword or search term you may use a feature called “Refine your Search”, which lets you give some keywords more emphasis than others. Just select the Emphasize Alternative. This is an unusual feature that may be of use in some instances.

Source: Pandia