By Pandia Guest Writer Lars VÃ¥ge

The search engine Accoona already exists in English and Chinese language versions, but is now also launched in Europe.

If you use the URL www.accoona.eu, you will — at least in some European countries — be forwarded automatically by IP recognition to a home page adapted to your local language.

The new languages are German, French, Dutch, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, but not any Scandinavian languages as yet.

As far I can see Accoona is developed by an American company with strong connections with China. Accoona has a twenty-year(!) contract with the English language Chinese newspaper China Daily delivering search services to their web site.

Accoona is claiming that they are using artificial intelligence in order to improve their search results. Nevertheless, I find several irrelevant listings on the first page of search results using various search queries.

The search engine result pages are of the traditional linear kind, but lacks links to cached copies of pages.

In addition to regular web search facilities, there is a business search service delivered by Dun & Bradstreet and news search delivered by Moreover (Moreover is used by giants like MSN as well).

On the right hand side you will find a sections with pull-down menus called SuperTarget. For a large number of search queries the alternatives given in this section may be more bewildering than helpful.

The best variants are those where you can limit your search results to a particular language or web site. Numbers within brackets tell you how many search result pages are found in the language or web site selected.

If you use more than one keyword you may make use of a feature called “Refine Your Search”, which lets you give some of the keywords more emphasis than others. Just select the Emphasize alternative. This is an unusual feature that may be of use in some instances.

See also: The Accoona search engine, is this something?

This article was originally published in Internetbrus, a Swedish blog on search engines and Internet searching that has been online since early 2001. It is written for both searchers and educators.