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?

Comments

To Be Honest

[ackthpt]

I don't think I could remember the spelling.

I'd probably have to google for it.

It's Not Google

[TheComputerMutt.ca]

What response do you expect form Slashdot members?

Never heard of it...

[__aaclcg7560]

Why would I use a search engine that I never heard of, much less know how spell it's name. I have a hard time with Google and Yahoo as it is.

Re:Never heard of it...

[Anonymous Freak]

Yeah, looks like a blatant piece of 'advertising by submitting to Slashdot' to me.

I'd have to say no...

[hacker]

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.

Re:I'd have to say no...

[Bogtha]

I agree, it's a poor set of results. I was assuming you were searching for something like Ant and getting a lot of pages about real ants, but that's obviously not the case - the result set includes lots of pages about the software, but the most relevant site isn't well ranked.

Looking through the results, it seems as though it's working with a quality weighting that is unrelated to the search term. If you look at the highest ranked websites, a lot of them are websites with an enormous number of inbound links, but not necessarily a lot of inbound links for that particular search term. Thus websites like Wikipedia, Sourceforge, Debian Packages, etc get ranked highly because they are popular websites, and the actual project website isn't ranked as well because although it's more relevant for the search terms, it's less popular overall.

I expect this is a reasonable approach when you are searching for terms for which a lot of websites are equally valuable, but breaks down for specialised areas where there are "canonical" URIs.

Doesn't repect quoted strings

[blamanj]

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.

let me guess

[minus_273]

"Bill Clinton helped launch the company behind the engine, which is also backed by the Chinese Government. "

that pretty much eliminates it from my book. As bad as google is, i don't my search engine directly controlled by the Chinese Communist party AND Bill Clinton. I imagine searching for Tianamen wont get you much compared to Google since it never happened...

Number of pages indexed?

[The Waxed Yak]

Granted, the number of pages indexed can be a misleading metric... but in the 20 minutes I've spent with it so far, I'm finding that a significant number of the pages I'm searching for are not in their index.

Maybe the things I'm searching for are a bit esoteric, but I think these guys are in for a serious game of catch-up since everything I searched for is readily available via Google.

You can have the best search algorithm in the world, but if your pool of data to search is smaller than the other guy, you're going to have a hard time of it. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see another player out there pushing Google, to force them to innovate more than they have. But if these guys have been in the business since 2004, they've had plenty of time to index pages.

Matata

[PuppiesOnAcid]

Now someone just needs to make a search engine called "Matata", and we'd have no worries for the rest of our days.

Re:Matata

[StikyPad]

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.

Too much marketing speak, not enough technology

[Aaron Isotton]

I'm a little skeptical. A search engine with a smiley in its logo? That's so 1999! But the FAQ puts me into an even more pessimistic mood. IMHO this Accoona thing is just lots of marketing speak, but doesn't really offer anything new, neither from the usability nor from the technology point of view.

To quote from the FAQ:

Accoona gives you the ability to use Artificial Intelligence technology to SuperTarget Your Search(TM)

SuperTarget Your Search TM depends on sophisticated Artificial Intelligence technology, but Accoona makes this feature easy to use. Accoona adds another step in which you see the words you typed in your search query appear separately. All you have to do is click on the most important word in the phrase.

Accoona's Artificial Intelligence uses the meaning of words to get you better results. For example, when you type five keywords in a traditional search engine, you're going to get every page that has all five keywords, no more, no less. With Accoona's Artificial Intelligence Software, which understands the meaning of the query, the user will get many additional results.

Accoona's Artificial Intelligence also allows you to SuperTarget Your Search TM. For example, within a query of five keywords, Accoona Artificial Intelligence lets the user select one keyword so that the search results are ranked to favor pages where the meaning of that one keyword is more important than the meaning of the other four keywords.

As far as I can see, this means that

• They understand synonyms and add them to your query "intelligently". I'm not sure whether this is really a good thing. It's probably useful sometimes, but will be a pain if the AI decides to add some bogus terms to your query. By the way, since Google looks at the content of the links pointing to a page they also have this kind of "related words" feature. With the difference that theirs is not based on AI, but on people.
• You can give different weights to the words you're looking for. I hoped not to see that ever again. This simply means that you're going to try multiple combinations priorities if you're really desperately looking for something.

Ah, and one last thing. Accoona doesn't have "teh snappy". It's just too damn slow. And I'm not waiting for search engines EVER AGAIN.

AI huh.

[moochfish]

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.

Re:Interestingly...

[ajdlinux]

BTW, http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://accoona.com gives interesting results.