Due to the generous networking opportunities at last week’s conference, it was easy to meet a variety of people even though the event was fairly small. One person I met was John Fernandez from Accoona. You may remember Accoona from their launch event with past President, Bill Clinton. I hadn’t heard a whole lot about Accoona lately and was interested to hear their take on running a search engine in a Google dominated world.
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
