Google, which revolutionized Web surfing through its innovative and effective search technologies, seems to be securely crowned as the King of Search Engines. However, hope springs eternal, and there are still some upstart companies out there that are attempting to knock Google off its throne. The latest to give it a shot is called Accoona.
One of Accoona’s major selling points is a feature called, rather awkwardly, “SuperTarget Your Search.” This filtering tool offers a handy way to allow users to focus searches, concentrating more on what they’re looking for.
general Web search on “Scott Joplin” on Accoona and Google, and found quite a bit of disparity in the results (112,393 for Accoona and 4,130,000 for Google). When I did a search on the phrase “mp3 players,” I got similar results: Accoona came up with 6,031,343 results, while Google boasted 187,000,000.
Quite frankly, while I appreciated Google’s higher numbers, that alone wouldn’t have made Google my preferred search engine — how many people go past the fifth page of results, anyway? There was also some variation in which sites came up in what order, but again, there were no really important differences.
Interestingly, I found Accoona’s results page easier to read; Google has added so much advertising — plus news links — on top of its listing that it’s gotten a bit difficult to find where my actual results begin. Accoona’s results page was much cleaner; the results were headed only by a “Tell me about Mp3 players” link that led to a definitions page. Of course, when/if Accoona succeeds in attracting advertising, that could change radically.
