Accoona

» see accoona.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Accoona took its name from Hakuna Matata, which should have been the first clue. It was a search engine run out of Jersey City with a second office in Shanghai, and it arrived in December 2004 claiming that artificial intelligence would understand your question better than a keyword index ever could. The signature feature was SuperTarget: you clicked one word in your query and told the engine that this word mattered more than the rest of them. An exclusive arrangement with China Daily was meant to open the Chinese market on day one.

Former president Bill Clinton was the launch's public face, which in 2004 bought a search startup more press than any demonstration of the product would have. For a few months the coverage was real. Accoona was written up as the company that had figured out semantics while Google was still counting links, and the company never corrected anyone who put it that way.

What the press did not buy was traffic. In July 2007, two and a half years after launch, Accoona drew 106,000 visitors from the United States across a whole month, a figure a mid-size newspaper site beat without effort. The company filed to go public anyway, seeking up to $80.5 million in an auction-style offering underwritten by the Maxim Group. The underwriter withdrew, and the offering went with it.

On 5 October 2008 the search stopped and four sentences went up in its place: "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." Twenty-five days later the domains and the business-to-business index were sold to Masterseek.

I was a student in Ankara for all four of those years, with Google in the address bar like everyone else I knew. Accoona never reached me or anyone I talked to; its entire life happened in the American and Chinese trade press. I found the name two decades later, in a list of search engines that had died.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the chess match ~

On 23 June 2005, in the ABC studios on Times Square, Accoona sat its toolbar down against Rustam Kasimdzhanov, then the FIDE world champion. The chess strength did not come from anything Accoona had built. It came from a prototype of Fritz 9, the German engine that had been taking grandmasters apart for years, running behind the Accoona name.

As theater it worked exactly as intended. A search company almost nobody had used got itself photographed beside a world champion, and the write-ups repeated the implication that the intelligence on the board was the intelligence in the search box. Chess engines and query parsers share a word and very little else.

~ the ipo that never priced ~

The company that filed for the offering had a founder with a record. Armand Rousso was arrested in January 1999 on money laundering and securities fraud charges for defrauding investors out of millions. He spent roughly a year in jail before taking a plea agreement with the federal government. Six years later he was running a search engine that wanted eighty million dollars from the public markets on the strength of a chess demonstration and a partnership with a Chinese newspaper.

By 2008 the auction-style offering had no underwriter and the search market had no room. Google was past sixty percent of American queries while Yahoo and Microsoft spent billions holding the places behind it. Every semantic-search startup of that generation was learning the same lesson in public: understanding the question is worth nothing when the index behind it is smaller than the one people already use.

~ the name today ~

Masterseek picked up the domains on 30 October 2008 and folded the business-to-business side into its own directory. The address still answers in 2026, serving fifty kilobytes of category links under a heading that reads "Popular Categories". It is a directory shell wearing a dead engine's name, which is the ordinary end for a search domain with any recognition left in it.

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