Accoona Co-Founder Has Colorful History

Is Accoona a search company or an e-commerce company. Though they present themselves as a search firm, it’s an active e-commerce side that provides virtually all of Accoona’s revenue.

“‘Investors should run away screaming,’ writes Henry Blodget – and he knows a thing or two about investors running away screaming,” said Valleywag editor Owen Thomas of Blodget’s take on Accoona. Blodget famously talked up tech stocks while with Merrill Lynch before the first dot-com bubble burst, and was later found to be trashing the same stocks privately.

That history probably makes Blodget more qualified than anyone to comment on Accoona:

Accoona describes itself as being in three businesses: lead-gen, search, and e-commerce. The first two businesses are listed first, presumably because they’re sexier, but make no mistake: Accoona is an e-commerce company: 97.5% of revenue in Q1 came from selling consumer electronics and home appliances (an awful business without massive scale, which Accoona lacks).

Accoona isn’t making money on that e-commerce, either, as Blodget cited an awful gross margin of less than 10 percent for that business.

Wilson proceeded to note a couple of legal episodes involving Rousso. In France and the US, Rousso was convicted of securities fraud (France) and pleaded guilty to a pair of felony charges while being banned from the securities industry (US).

“There’s a lot more sordid reading in the filing,” VC Ratings said of Accoona’s S-1 filing for the IPO. “But, it all points to an offering that should never see the light of the public markets.”

There were enough things going on with Accoona that I challenged John to write up five things you don’t know about Accoona and I’d post it to OMB. John came through and so now I am as well.

1. Exchange Place: Accoona’s Exchange Place is the first cross-industry online advertising platform and pay-per-lead bidding system. It’s an interactive marketplace for a wide variety of products and services where pre-screened buyers and sellers are matched, often in real time, through online and offline direct response channels. Advertisers sign up for free by using a self-service console where they define segmentation criteria and manage bids and budgets. Active consumers provide information online or over the phone through a simple questionnaire and receive targeted product and service offers, comparison pricing, direct sales access and other services.
2. Buyer’s Edge: Buyer’s Edge allows shoppers to search for and compare products and prices available at numerous online merchants. Buyer’s Edge helps consumers make better choices by enabling them to find items they are looking for, compare products, prices (including shipping), product availability and reputation of the merchant, from among hundreds of online merchants. The service is free to consumers with revenue generated from merchants who list their products in a pay-for-placement model.
3. Accoona China: In December 2004, we launched the Accoona Search Engine in China and in October 2006, opened an office in Shanghai. Accoona China also maintains an exclusive relationship with China Daily, China’s largest English Language newspaper, and search bar partnerships with major portals such as Sina and Sohu.
4. Accoona News: Accoona News lists more than 80,000 breaking news articles daily, just minutes after publication, from renowned newspapers, magazines, press releases, trade journals, niche publication, blogs and broadcast media. Additionally, Accoona’s SuperTarget Your Search feature allows users to filter results post-query by date and time, publication, geographic location, company, people, and other related fields.
5. Accoona Business: Accoona’s business database – provided free to users, is one of the largest on the web, with approximately 43 million unique records on global businesses. We’ve partnered with companies such as Dun & Bradstreet to provide contact information, business description, annual sales, number of employees and geographical location for businesses in North America, Europe and Asia. Users can also SuperTarget Your Search in order to sort businesses by revenue, employee size, geographic location and business type.

Is Accoona trying to take on Google as a search engine? I don’t think so and they’re smart to approach the market with things that the major search engines may not be doing particularly well. In fact, that was a theme I heard quite a few times during the conference.

Comments ]]> http://www.webpronews.com/things-you-didnt-know-about-accoona-2007-05/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/accoona-europe-launch-spurs-controversy-2006-06 http://www.webpronews.com/accoona-europe-launch-spurs-controversy-2006-06#comments Mon, 26 Jun 2006 15:33:48 +0000 WebProNews Staff http://www.webpronews.com/?p=30035 Although the search engine company will debut its service in Europe, its Chinese history has driven some to criticize Accoona.

Britain’s Guardian noted the pending debut of Accoona.eu, calling it the Continent’s first dedicated search engine. Although its launch will be feted in Paris, it won’t debut without controversy.

Accoona, like rivals Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, operates in China. It has strong relations in China, due to being co-founded there by the China Daily Information Company. The report cited China Daily as an agency of the government.

Member of Parliament Derek Wyatt, chairing the all-party Internet committee, criticized Accoona in the report for its compliance with Chinese censorship:

Not exactly a warm welcome for the search engine, whose CEO Eckhard Pfeiffer said that right or wrong, “We cannot violate local laws.”

Accoona touts its Artificial Intelligence technology as being an advantage over other search engines. By understanding the meaning of queries made by searchers, Accoona claims it can deliver more relevant results than just finding pages containing all of the keywords queried.

Its SuperTarget technology lets users designate one keyword out of a group as being the most important. Accoona’s results then rank the pages by the importance of the meaning of that one keyword over the others in the string.

—
Tag:

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

On Accoona’s home page, the typical search query box occupies the center, with three buttons beneath it for Web, Business, and News searches. Accoona made these placements to encourage users to use advanced search features they tend to ignore on other search sites, the company said in EE Times.

Accoona claimed their AI technology can understand the meaning of a query and return results based on that understanding, instead of just generating responses where the keywords in the query all appear on a web page.

By doing a multi-keyword News search, users can use the SuperTarget options Accoona offers. For example, one keyword out of the query can be emphasized. That sorts the results starting with pages where the meaning of that keyword is more important than the meaning of the other keywords.

Other options to refine a search can filter the results by the publisher, company names, and names of people mentioned in stories related to the query.

Some searches will return an Accoona Answers icon and the text “Tell me more about:” followed by a search term. This is a link to Answers.com and its entries for the term. Answers.com parent company GuruNet has a business agreement with Accoona, as do Moreover, Euro News, FAST Search & Transfer, and Dun & Bradstreet.

A Business search on keywords returns Dun & Bradstreet links with the names and descriptions of businesses Accoona thinks match the query. Clicking on the D&B link brings up a quick profile of the company and a link to where a lengthier D&B report can be purchased. Also, Business search results can be filtered by the various SuperTarget options available.

Accoona also displays paid search ads on the page with the D&B quick profile. Those advertisements come from Yahoo’s Overture search advertising unit. On the finance side, Accoona claimed to have over $100 million in funding from private investment funds, the article said. The company also has a 20-year deal with China Daily to be the exclusive search portal for it across China.

—
Tag: |

Drag this to your Bookmarks.

Add to | DiggThis | Yahoo! My Web

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

“Even if you offered me $70 billion, I am not sure I could effectively break into the search engine business. To me, Accoona’s late entry is a sign that the teams headed for the playoffs have been named and the competition will now begin in earnest. But maybe I’m wrong. As Rick Aristotle Munarriz pointed out, maybe it’s just starting to boom. Either way, there’s some tough competition down the road from the big guys in the search engine business.”

Analysts probably said the same thing when Google launched!

Continuing with Accoona …

Can Accoona Challenge Google?

BusinessWeek looks at the launch of Accoona and whether the new business search engine can compete.

“Even with a Clinton appearance, Accoona has a long way to go before it can compete with Google. Its artificial intelligence had better prove to be a quick learner. Or like many of the dot-coms that came and went, the outfit’s launch party may turn out to be its high point as a business.”

Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.

Today, Google’s market share of organic search results is shrinking rapidly while the size and influence of Yahoo and MSN’s organic search increases. Add to the mix a number of up and coming search firms such as AskJeeves and the new Chinese Government owned Accoona, and we see a remarkable picture emerging, the end of the mono-culture search universe. This has great implications for SEOs and their clients as the number of essential search tools to get listings on has increased. For clients, it will be easier to be found if there are more places to find your site, and for SEOs, it will become easier to make client sites findable. A multi-engine search-universe will also protect site owners from difficult periods like the one experienced during the infamous Florida Update of last Christmas season.

Today, Google has approximately 46% of the organic search market with Yahoo (26%) and MSN (21%) following close behind. (Yahoo owns Inktomi, a database of spidered sites that currently provides results to MSN.Com. These results will be replaced by a proprietary database when the new MSN(beta) search is released.

Back in 1999, there were six major search engines, Alta Vista, Lycos, Infoseek, AOL, Yahoo and the new upstart, Google. Each search tool had unique characteristics and each depended on what were then fairly rigid keyword densities. This led to the creation of “doorway” pages, or a series of pages designed to rank well on different search engines under a set of keyword phrases. A unique doorway page would be created for each search engine, and in some cases, each keyword phrase targeted. This technique led to the obvious clogging of search engines with a lot of useless pages, “page-pollution”. While the similarities between the Big3 search tools should limit the urge to design them, webmasters and SEOs are cautioned to watch to make sure this technique doesn’t become common again.

Google Dives Deeper

Common-sense SEO once stated that Google only likes to travel to the second layer of a database, or as far as the second variable in the URL. Sometimes it would delve deeper into a site but often it would not. That was the conventional wisdom until very recently. According to SEO Roundtable moderator “projectphp”, GoogleBot is now capable of diving down to the sixth variable in database URLs.

This has fairly large implications for SEOs worrying about getting specific product listings for their clients. In the past, we were always forced to tell clients that we could not force Google deep into a database but would do our best to get visitors as close as possible. Now, it is obviously possible for a dynamically generated page to achieve strong listings, provided the requisite SEO has been performed. A note of caution though. Many databases are extremely deep and contain literally thousands of different products. SEO work on every product page may prove cost-prohibitive. There is however, some hope that effective site-mapping and very tight SEO work on basic templates will be able to provide a strong work-around to cost considerations.

Jim Hedger is the SEO Manager of StepForth Search Engine Placement Inc. Based in Victoria, BC, Canada, StepForth is the result of the consolidation of BraveArt Website Management, Promotion Experts, and Phoenix Creative Works, and has provided professional search engine placement and management services since 1997. http://www.stepforth.com/ Tel – 250-385-1190 Toll Free – 877-385-5526 Fax – 250-385-1198

Accoona’s Artificial Intelligence Software greatly improves relevance by returning search results based on the meaning of words, rather than the traditional key word matching methodology.

“Accoona’s Artificial Intelligence Technology will elevate Search Engine performance to a new unprecedented level, allowing the most relevant search available today.” said Eckhard Pfeiffer, Accoona’s Chairman and former CEO of Compaq Computer.

Accoona has also entered into a distribution agreement with Yahoo’s Overture, providing Overture Targeted pay-per-click search results to Accoona.com users.

In addition to its US launch, Accoona simultaneously debuted in China in coordination with its partner, The China Daily Information Company, the official and largest English language web destination of China. Through a 20-year exclusive partnership with China Daily, and its Web affiliates throughout China, Accoona expects over 10 million daily unique users from China.

“It is my belief that, as a unique online business information search engine, Accoona.com can provide another fast track for the business exchange and cooperation between China and other countries.” Stated Qizheng Zhao, Minister, State Council Information Office, People’s Republic of China. “My department will continue to support such efforts to promote Chinese enterprises in doing business with companies throughout the world.”

Accoona’s International Web Search Platform is complemented with one of the World’s largest Databases of Online Business Information, comprised of hundreds of millions of records on millions of companies worldwide. The company has spent almost all of 2004 building and acquiring data for this unique business database and Accoona will offer this business information free of charge to Internet users worldwide. Accoona merges traditional website content with relevant business data utilizing the Accoona QuickProfile, a new presentation feature that takes the search experience to the next level. One-click access immediately delivers relevant business information such as primary contact, address, email, fax, phone number, and other important data.

Accoona also introduced a new interactive search experience for its users with its SuperTargeted search feature. The user has further control in the search process by highlighting key word(s), thus emphasizing what key word(s) are more important within the search query. For example, the user entering a 5 key word query is able to highlight one or more key words to prioritize the key words within a search query. The Accoona Search Engine automatically ranks the results beginning with the pages with the “highlighted” key word(s) or the meaning of that key word(s) that is more relevant to the others as determined by the user. The corresponding, “SuperTargeted” search results are then merged with the Accoona QuickProfile business data.

WebProNews | Breaking eBusiness News
Your source for investigative ebusiness reporting and breaking news.

“I hope you all make lots of money,” Clinton told executives at the launch of Accoona Corp.

On a funny side note, I joked last week that the name of the company reminded me of the song from the Lion King, “Accoona Matata”. The press release had a scary revelation…

Accoona takes its name from the Swahili phrase, “accoona matata,” for “no worries,” popularized by Disney’s film, “The Lion King.”

Look for the “Bear Necessities” search engine coming soon to a computer near you!

Hat-tip to Ron!

UPDATE: Gary reviews Accoona.

Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.