Accoona is a search engine for news, business and web search. It has been around for two years but recently relaunched in the United States.

Here at Pandia, we are fans of David Letterman, and often when we sit down to do a review, we ask ourselves: �Is this something?� So bring out your hula hoops as we ask ourselves if Accoona really “is� something.

The Chinese connection
Accoona has strong ties to China: The China Daily Information Company (CDIC), which describes itself as an official Chinese government agency, hold a significant equity stake in Accoona Corp.

According to Wikepedia �Accoona formed a 20-year exclusive partnership with Chinadaily.com.cn. Through this partnership, with China Daily and its widespread Chinese affiliates, Accoona expects 10 million hits daily from the otherwise isolated Chinese user base.�

After Google has taken such a beating for fraternizing with the Chinese regime, you have to ask yourself if Accoona’s Chinese connection will be a turn-off for searchers and prospective business partners in favor of freedom of information.

The English version Accoona.com is not removing pages criticizing the Chinese government. The Chinese version is in Chinese and we have not been able to test it.

Intelligent search
Accoona’s search engine is built on artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms. This enables it to retrieve more results for stories associated with the search term and not just containing the term.

This means that if, for instance, you search for “Oscar winners”, Accoona delivers stories about Academy Award winners, whether or not the stories mention the word Oscar. The search engine understands the larger context of your search.

We have tested this, and it really works. Accoona’s index is nowhere the size of Google’s, but the search results are relevant and they are presented in a neat, uncluttered list. You can sort the results by relevancy or by date.

Special search features
If your search term has more than one word, you will be presented with the “SuperTarget Your Search” function when you come to the search results page. This function helps you to refine your search results pull-down menus.

Your choices include emphasizing one of the words in your search term or refining the search using several criteria including “people mentioned,” “date published,” and “publisher,” among others.

At the rate the Web is growing, every search engine needs a way to focus searches. Accoona’s is advanced, but perhaps too advanced for the average user?

If you search for facts, like “William Shakespeare�, the first choice on the search results page is a link named Answers, tell me about William Shakespeare. This is an answer search feature provided by Answers.com.

The Accoona toolbar
Accoona offers a free toolbar. The Accoona toolbar is classified as adware or spyware by some malware removal programs.

The toolbar has been bundled with for instance screen savers and some people feel they have been tricked into installing the toolbar without their consent. It gets bad reviews and is hard to de-install.

Is this something?
So is this something? We don’t think so. Accoona has some nice features like the artificial intelligence and the SuperTarget tool.

But Accoona has a huge public relations issue because of their Chinese connection. They have also obviously made some bad choices regarding the toolbar. We don’t see them recovering from this anytime soon.
The name Accoona is derived from the phrase “Hakuna Matata” meaning “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” in Swahili. At Accoona headquarters they have a couple of things to worry about.