Slashdot Mirror
Accoona - How Does This Search Engine Rate?
An anonymous reader asks: "How many of you have tried the new AI-based search engine, Accoona? How does it compare with the other big search engines (Google, MSN Search, Yahoo, etc)? In late 2004, the Associated Press reported that Bill Clinton helped launch the company behind the engine, which is also backed by the Chinese Government. The EETimesUK has another article which describes how the search engine is supposed to work." For those who have tried Accoona, how would you rate the accuracy of its results?
I just tried it with several of our OSS project pages (which rank PR7 or higher), and Accoona doesn't even list the main project homepage well into the 4th and 5th page of results. I gave up after that. Google, Yahoo and MSN all have the project pages as the first or second hit, across all three of those engines.
Yeah, looks like a blatant piece of 'advertising by submitting to Slashdot' to me.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
I tried a search with a two-word quoted string, and the first result had the two words in separate paragraphs. That's not good.
Actually, the results you get searching for "Tianamen" are pretty similar to what you get from Google. Then again, if you wanted to get the full story, you might be inclined to spell Tiananmen correctly.
That being said, I won't be using Accoona. I don't like it, for one thing, and I also don't want my search to be influenced too much by the Chinese government if I can help it. I don't mind so much about Bill Clinton being their spokesman, though any time Clinton and the Chinese are working together, you'd better be careful.
An anonymous shill asks, "Try our search engine! Please!!"
So I read this little press release and I wasn't that impressed. You want to talk about context parsing? Google started that type of search innovation. Not commonly known is that Google even suppresses ads when it guesses its users are searching without any intentions of making purchases, such as for research. This is illustrated here:
Search Argentina
Search Population
Search Both (no ads)
I'd say that's pretty contextual if you ask me. This search engine is a bunch of hype, and much farther behind than it thinks.
The URL "www.accoona.com" is listed as a spyware site by both Spybot Search and Destroy and by MVPS. Both of these modify the /etc/hosts file to map "www.accoona.com" to 127.0.0.1.
a) It's the name of a song, not a movie.
b) Titles can't be copyrighted.
c) Trademarks can only be enforced against confusingly similar products. IE, not a search engine vs. a theme park.
d) The Disney spelling is Hakuna Matata.
e) The tradmark is Class 25 (See: Your own link) which means it's for clothing.
So no, to answer your question, they're not.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
The song was first published in a movie titled The Lion King.
It doesn't matter if the song was published on a CD, in a movie, or through mindwaves; the title of that song cannot be copyrighted.
There exists a trademark of the phrase "Hakuna Matata" on clothing. The trademark registration says nothing of "The Lion King." Using one word from a trademark with a different spelling for an unrelated product over which there is no trademark is a huge stretch. You might as well say Burger King is likely to get sued because their name is diluting the Lion King, since lions obviously are not burgers.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Search for Accoona spyware (google or Accoona) and you will see how they advertise. This is not only spyware, but they are apparently spammers, according to Wikpedia. How did this get on slashdot? I am amazed that a site on /. is an ad for spyware. I hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist , but is this the end of /.
Stay tuned for new sig...
BTW, http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://accoona.com gives interesting results.