Accoona Matata: The Quest for Google's Throne

How do you challenge Google's position as king of Web search engines?

You do it with a lot of recognizable faces, which is what Accoona Corp. did at the United Nations in New York on March 8.

Accoona, a new search engine with extra business and news search features, promises a new level of searching intelligence which can uncover more relevant results than other search engines, according to Accoona.

The press conference at the sunny Delegates' Dining Room at the UN featured chess legend Garry Kasparov (above, left) and Accoona Chairman Eckhard Pfeiffer (above, right), who is also a former CEO of Compaq Computer Corp., now a part of Hewlett-Packard. Former President Bill Clinton is also a supporter of the new search engine and has made appearances on its behalf.

Accoona's search engine features technology that recognizes acronyms and abbreviations for what they are. For example, if you enter the search terms "car NY," Accoona will know that a car and an automobile are the same things and that "NY" usually stands for New York. The result is that many of the results won't actually have "car" or "NY" in the text but will be relevant and useful since they contain "New York" or "automobile."

A "Super Target" features lets you narrow down your search by various criteria. For example, if you entered "NCAA Hampton" into Accoona and clicked the News button, it would return a number of news stories on Hampton University's loss to Monmouth University in a game to decide which school would advance to the NCAA Division 1 men's basketball tournament.

The Super Target feature allows you to narrow down the results by the time the story was posted online, by country, state, or the publisher of the news item or by the name of people mentioned in the articles. For example, you could have narrowed the 2,700 search results to the 497 articles which mentioned Chris Kenny, a Monmouth player who hit six three-point baskets in the game, thus setting a record for the tournament's opening round.

For business searches, Accoona offers links to company data from Dun & Bradsteet as well as providing the Super Target feature to help narrow down searches.

Is there room for another search engine? Only time will tell.

And yes, the name "Accoona" is related to the Swahili phrase "Hakuna Matata," which was made famous in the play "Lion King" and loosely translates to "Don't worry, be happy."

Photo © 2006 Stadium Circle Features