Accoona, the AI powered search engine has not received much popularity. The engine touts a powerful AI based algorithm that uses techniques that go beyond keyword search to retrieve relevant results. With a Chinese company having majority stake in the engine, it has received certain negative publicity.
The review from WebProNews suggests that there are some effective AI algorithms at work under the hood. Branded as a “business search” engine, Accoona does not pose an immediate threat to any of the major established players in the search market.
A quote from the article
“Accoona, in addition to web spiders that populate and update its database, has access to hundreds of millions of records from worldwide sources, delivering the richest and most robust database for search results. With a database of over 20 million US companies and over 30 million companies worldwide, the user will be able to search for businesses utilizing a large array of criteria: such as Name, Physical Address, Telephone, Fax, Business Description, industry category, company’s URL and geographic location.”
Notable features of the engine are the clean interface and the options to refine and weigh the key words. Its one of the few engines that directly refers to using AI. But with AI you do expect some real stellar results. Here’s a article I mined from SearchEngineWatch that comments on the results obtained from Accoona.
The lack of a full fledged crawling of the web can be attributed to the less than spectacular performance of Accoona. However, the use of AI does point towards the type of technological shift that search engines are taking to get more relevancy related to content of web documents.
