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?

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.

Requires javascript to work

[DrSkwid]

so I think it is a stinking pile of shit

Doesn't work

[Tango42]

It's meant to do all kinds of clever things - I took a look, even read the FAQ, and after a couple of minutes gave up. I couldn't work out how to make it do anything other than be a standard search engine that seemed to give worse results than google. A SE that I have to spend ages working out how to use isn't worth the hassle.

Backed by the Chinese government?

[babbling]

So, the company was helped with launching by a former US president, and the search engine is backed by the Chinese government? Sounds pretty suspicious to me.

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 [accoona.com] 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.

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.

Re:Requires javascript to work

[Anonymous Crowhead]

You anti-javascript types seem really bitter. You can code all your functionallity in CGI if you want, but to abandon javascript and cookies. How do you have user accounts without cookies? Log in every page refresh? Use Apache authentication? That pop up user id/password is ugly, it blocks your site unless you have an account and it has no "log out" method. I just don't see anything beyond static web content with js and cookies unless it's horribly over programmed on the server side.

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.

Not Buzzword Compliant

[fm6]

It's interesting that the buzzword "A.I." can still generate interest among Slashdotters. In the industrying, labelling something "A.I." is fatal, because there's so much unfulfilled hype associated with that term. Which was never that useful, being rather vague.

Whatever the technology behind it, you won't get me to try a new search engine by talking about the technology behind it. You need to tell me exactly how my search results will differ from what I'll get from Google. And even then you've got a tough sell. I used to keep a links menu for all the different search engines so I could refer to them in case I found Google's results unsatisfactory. Finally got rid of this menu: I rarely referred to it, and when I did, I never got any hits that Google had missed.

Re:Looks like...

[Anonymous Coward]

The imitation is only skin deep. The innovation is in the code that performs the search, not the HTML that presents it to the user.
The about page gives more detail :
http://accoona.com/about/about_accoona.jsp [accoona.com]
If You want innovation in web page design, a search engine is probably the wrong place to look. They will be far more inclined to go with a familiar, functional, design...
Besides, with a search engine, it is what is behind in, the search itself, not the HTML, that counts.

Re:let me guess

[Red Alastor]

<sarcasm>Wow, scary !

And they only have 5.6 million results for cheese while Google returns 125 million results. Isn't it outrageous ?!</sarcasm>