Wednesday, October 08, 2008

Accoona: Business search engine goes out of business


It started with quite a bit of fanfare in 2006, but the business-centric Accoona search engine turned off its lights this week, blaming too much competition in the search engine market.

When it launched in March 2006 with a big media event at the United Nations in New York, former President Bill Clinton made a video sales pitch and chess champion Garry Kasparov made an appearance. Also present was the new chairman of Accoona Corp., none other than Eckhard Pfeiffer, former CEO of Compaq Computer.

Accoona's home page (see above) was clean and uncluttered and the search engine offered some nifty features, like the ability to quickly filter a long list of data by a person's name or the name of a company. Unfortunately, Accoona apparently couldn't market itself loud enough to be heard above the roar of Google, Yahoo and the other major search engines. 

Accoona's going-away message was short and to the point:

"Dear Accoona search users,

Due to an overwhelmingly competitive search market, Accoona.com and Accoona.cn will no longer be active.

We thank you for your previous support.

Sincerely,

Accoona Management"

Copyright 2008 Stadium Circle Features

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Bob: Thanks for the alert... I was at that fancy launch and remember being impressed by their launch budget but not much else...