Accoona - How Does This Search Engine Rate? 139
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?
To Be Honest (Score:5, Funny)
I'd probably have to google for it.
Re:To Be Honest (Score:1, Funny)
Re:To Be Honest (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyway, i'm suspicious about their great "AI". AI is supposed to think on it's own, make attempts to make something new, learn from it's own istakes. Just following the learning path described by the original programmer leaves it still dumb as it is, maybe a bigger databank behind it, but still dumb.
The search engine isn't really the place for an AI to start up anyway, too much information throughput with too few references.
You don't get smart by reading
Re:To Be Honest (Score:2, Interesting)
I guess it could become very popular in Portugal, where accoona means, literally, 'the cunt':
"-Hey , I have to write a paper about some really obscure subject and I have no idea where to start looking. Any ideas?
-Sure! Take a look in 'the cunt', I usually find everything I need over there. Couldn't live without it, heh!"
Re:To Be Honest (Score:2)
Plastic flowerpot manufacturer...
http://www.accoona.com/about/press/press_release_
So easy-
1 make plastic flowerpots
2 Set up Chinese Language e commerce website
3 Profit
Re:To Be Honest (Score:2)
I'm inclined to think that this must be some weird fetish that they didn't catch. Not plastic flowerpots, but plastic flowerpot manufacturers.
Re:To Be Honest ... hakuna? (Score:2)
Re:To Be Honest (Score:2)
So, is it goggle, gogle, google, goglle, goggel, (Score:2)
Same problem.
It's Not Google (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's Not Google (Score:2)
One day Accoona might wake up
Okay, enough with the jokes.
Was it just me, or are all the links through Overture?
http://accoona.com/search.jsp?qt=skynet [accoona.com]
Never heard of it... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Never heard of it... (Score:3, Informative)
You think Accoona is bad... (Score:1)
Re:Never heard of it... (Score:1)
Re:Never heard of it... (Score:2)
Requires javascript to work (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Requires javascript to work (Score:1, Interesting)
Oh, and for all the clueless webpage "coders" who wouldn't know user-friendly usability if it hauled off and slapped them in the head, all itchy at the keyboard ready to type such pithy clever-isms in response to yours and my posts such as, "Gee, the Internet for you must be a lonely place"
Guess what? It's not. It works just fine without your clueless webpages. It must be a lonely
Re:Requires javascript to work (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Requires javascript to work (Score:2)
I think some people are insane with their complaining about cookies. Cookies are essentially harmless and aren't at all needed by website's to track you. Unless you switch IP addresses be
Re:Requires javascript to work (Score:2)
Re:Requires javascript to work (Score:2)
Long ago when HTML was new I planned out a multiple file method of webpage design that included a mapping file that would gather data from one resource, a template from another, a style from a third, and code, graphics, etc
Re:Requires javascript to work (Score:2)
All of my sites have Javascript in them, my latest even make extensive use of XMLHttpRequest, neither of which are REQUIRED to make it work.
FFS that web search is a text input and three buttons.
You display your ignorance with "Apache authentication" it is HTTP Authentication. But you are right about not being able to log out. It was not until the world of Firefox Extensions that such a feature was available.
"
Re:Requires javascript to work (Score:2)
I'd have to say no... (Score:5, Informative)
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... (Score:2)
That really doesn't say anything other than that this search engine differs from more traditional search engines. That could be true if it has severe deficiencies, or it could be true if it was significantly better than the others. It really depends on whether the pages you are talking about are most relevant to the particular keywords you used, for this search engine's intended audience.
Re:I'd have to say no... (Score:2)
I searched for the projects, by name. Plucker [google.com] for example..
Now try the same search in Accoona [accoona.com]. I went well into the 4th and 5th page of results and STILL didn't find a link to the actual project page itself. In fact, there are 30,241 results returned, but I went onto the 14th page just now, and STILL not a single link to the project page.
AI or not, it isn't returning results for what I'm searching for.
Re:I'd have to say no... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:I'd have to say no... (Score:2)
I meant to say "equally authorative" here.
Re:I'd have to say no... (Score:2)
Re:I'd have to say no... (Score:2)
But seriously... it did have a hard time when I asked it for deck2omf [sourceforge.net] (Google PR1). Not a surprise---sort of a project that maybe three people in the world care about---but that project also includes some really useful binary diff tools that folks might find helpful (specifically designed
Looks like... (Score:1)
Re:Looks like... (Score:2)
Re:Looks like... (Score:2)
Not that I'm loathe to accept a better search engine or anything - Google just does what I want (most of the time)... Thanks for checking it out a little further.
Re:Looks like... (Score:1, Insightful)
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:Looks like... (Score:2)
What Google started, their innovative "page ranking" algorithm was widely hyped. The effect was that web sites started to abuse the system by various means to increase their ranking. The only way that Google could fight against this was to change their algorithm in all sorts of ways to downgrade the cheating sites. Of course Google must keep these changes secret, to prevent people from finding ways to exploit them. I bet if you look at what Go
Doesn't work (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd give it a 10 (Score:3, Funny)
Backed by the Chinese government? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Backed by the Chinese government? (Score:1)
Re:Backed by the Chinese government? (Score:2)
Why do I suspect that a search engine backed by the Chinese government might not give you the helpful "Links have been removed by order of some guy with a gun" messages at the bottom of censored results?
Actually I've been surprised for a while that the PRC didn't just start it's own search engine and blocking everything else. (Although I guess why bother, when you can get U.S. companies to bid against each other to do your censorship.)
However, they do seem
The face (Score:1)
Doesn't repect quoted strings (Score:5, Informative)
let me guess (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Re:let me guess (Score:2, Informative)
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 [accoona.com] 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 [wikipedia.org] are working together, you'd
Re:let me guess (Score:1)
Yeah, the Chinese don't have history totally scrubbed, but they're working hard at it.
Re:let me guess (Score:1)
Re:let me guess (Score:3, Insightful)
And they only have 5.6 million results for cheese while Google returns 125 million results. Isn't it outrageous ?!</sarcasm>
Re:let me guess (Score:2)
Re:let me guess (Score:2)
Re:let me guess (Score:2)
That's thanks to Wikipedia's article [wikipedia.org], not Accoona...
They're just using the mirror on Answers.com...
Re:let me guess (Score:3, Funny)
Re:let me guess (Score:1)
It finds what I need (Score:2)
Slightly offtopic - does anyone have any information on how Google ranks pages? I've read this page [mikeindustries.com] which has some really good information in it, but does anyone know of any other guides on search engine optimization with google?
Number of pages indexed? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Matata (Score:2)
Re:Matata (Score:1)
Did you read that [a movie well-protected by Disney copyrights and trademarks is] actually where the name came from?
Are the operators of this search engine expecting a letter from Disney's lawyers? (cite: tarr [uspto.gov])
Re:Matata (Score:4, Informative)
b) Titles [copyright.gov] 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 [google.com].
e) The tradmark is Class 25 (See: Your own link) which means it's for clothing [uspto.gov].
So no, to answer your question, they're not.
Trademark dilution (Score:2)
It's the name of a song, not a movie.
The song was first published in a movie titled The Lion King.
Trademarks can only be enforced against confusingly similar products.
This was true until the mid-1990s, when the United States and other countries enacted laws regulating dilution of sufficiently famous trademarks [wikipedia.org]. As for whether a dilution claim will succeed, you're also assuming that Disney won't drag out the trial long enough to bankrupt the defendant.
Re:Trademark dilution (Score:3, Informative)
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 su
Re:Trademark dilution (Score:2)
the title of that song cannot be copyrighted.
Granted. I wasn't suggesting that the title could be copyrighted but that the work could be used as evidence of the trademark's fame.
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.
Disney Enterprises and Burger King Brands are bot
Can't even ego-surf! (Score:2)
It also doesn't seem to accept double-quotes to indicate phrases, which is a very important feature for me!
Too much marketing speak, not enough technology (Score:4, Insightful)
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:
As far as I can see, this means that
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:Too much marketing speak, not enough technology (Score:2)
Well put. What I never see mentioned when anyone is talking about Google's success is that, due to their bloat-free design and the fact that they actually seemed to give a shit about the user experience, pages loaded damn fast. I started using Google when I was still on dialup because I got sick and tired of other Search engines' load times. That was what vaulted Google to the top, not PageRank. If they had debuted just a year or two later, when broadba
Scary (Score:1)
Connections with Bill makes me think connections with the government.
The direct copy cat interface of google, reminds of recent requests for google searches from the DOJ.
All in all, I find the search engine scary, and won't use it. I just can't get over the fealing that it might be an instrument of big brother, and the AI isn't to get better search results, but to analyse the search itself.
First impression (Score:2, Funny)
Take THAT Black Training and Enterprise Group [bteg.co.uk]!
It rates poorly (Score:2)
also, searching for my alias loteck on google gives me an ego boost, accoonaing my nickname wants to sell me bad techno, it would appear.
Yeah, thats right. "Accoonaing"? Never gonna happen.
Beats live.com (Score:2)
Article summary should have read: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Article summary should have read: (Score:2)
Think about it like this:
A search engine only makes money through advertising / sponsored links; not through your visit as such. (unlike online shops which need to sell something straight to you).
Running an "article" on slashdot is, if indeed issued by them, a brave thing - it will bring loads of traffic; and if the search engine isn't up to scra
Some serious (but basic) flaws (Score:2)
1. They do not show you the link under each results, they only show you the domain. So in the quick search that I did I ended up with a ton of results at the same domain, but can't tell which one is which.
2. I figure ok, I'll just mouse over the link to see where it goes to... NOPE, does not work.
3. It's definitely missing a lot of links. In searching for something that I am f
NO CACHE = useless (Score:1)
Weak on the links (Score:2)
Muhtattah? (Score:1)
oh, what a wonderful thing.
AI huh. (Score:3, Informative)
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 [google.com]. 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 [google.com]
Search Population [google.com]
Search Both [google.com] (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:AI huh. (Score:2)
Learn Spanish really fast
An astonishingly fast and easy way
to learn Spanish. Words just stick
www.linkwordlanguages.com
but it didn't interfere with my use of the browser, so I don't care.
OO == search? (Score:2)
Google, Yahoo, Accoona
Other markers I've noticed are that hamburger joints are yellow and red, and that ED drugs must end in -a.
Accoona Rating (Score:1)
1. Google
2. Yahoo
3. AskJeeves
4. AllTheWeb
5. AolSearch
6. HotBot
7. Teoma
8. AltaVista
9. GigaBlast
10. LookSmart
11. Lycos
12. MSN Search
13. Netscape Search
14. DMOZ
(...15-99...)
100. Accoona
Yep. I think it might register as a minor roadbump in Google's quest to take over the world.
A1-based search engine? (Score:2)
Not Buzzword Compliant (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
This article is a troll (Score:1, Flamebait)
If you've got a problem with what I've said, you're welcome to reply. I signed my digital name to this post.
Miserable failure (Score:1)
Spyware! (Score:2, Informative)
Bill Clinton? (Score:1)
No Unicode (Score:2)
Something smells like incompetence here.
no results (Score:2)
http://ptth.net/squish/ [ptth.net]
http://accoona.com/search.jsp?qt=squish+ptth&col=w c&charset=utf-8&la=en [accoona.com]
http://www.google.com/search?q=squish+ptth&start=0 &ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozill a:en-US:official [google.com]
How does it rate? (Score:2)
When/if it does, you won't have to come here and Slashvertise to know it either, as we will already be talking about it.
Spyware advertisement? (Score:3, Informative)
Fortunately it has the obligatory double O (Score:3, Funny)
Interestingly... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Interestingly... (Score:3, Informative)
Bad omen (Score:2)
Yeah, it's affiliated with two obvious sources for true and unbiased information.
Perjury and oppression of the masses, way to go Accoona!
LK
Cover your eyes! (Score:2)
Google is the future.
Google does no evil.
There is no Internet, only Googlenet.
Google made me the man I am today.
If Google says it's so, it's so.
I don't want to live in a world without Google.
Google for president.
We should pray for Google every night before we go to sleep.
If Christ has risen, He's working for Google.
Poor (Score:2)
Re:Poor (Score:2)
That's because you clicked the "news" button and thus searched their news archive. Had you pressed the "web" button you would have received 200 results. Certainly that's less than 14,700, but how deep into Google's results do you need to go? "Yeah, here's what I was looking for, right at item 8297."
Live.com returns 1,732 and Yahoo 782. Interestingly, mamma.com (a metasearch engine) returned only 33.
But I digres
Re:Poor (Score:2)
All your clicks are belong to us! (Score:2)
Slashdotted (Score:2)
2) It's Slashdotted (no response.) Google can survive a Slashdotting.
Me sticking to Google.
Re:more importantly... (Score:1)