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:
“As far as we can make it, the net should be free and open. That applies to Accoona as well as everyone else. Anything that operates in Europe should know the principle of our identity is liberal and that nothing should be hidden. I hope advertisers will shun them,”
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.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
