WTF: Clinton hypes search engine

<![CDATA[There must be too much VC money in search, again. Bill Clinton, who charges something like a quarter million for a speech, appeared at the launch of Accoona, a new search engine. It was webcast, too. Very bubble era.
I tried Accoona, which lets you pick the most important word in a search phrase, and it produced odd results. With the typical hubris of a blogger, I typed my own name in, but Accoona spit out a lot of sites before it actually got to this one. The ranking is hard to understand, because checking “Mitch” as the key word or “Ratcliffe” made no difference.
Searching on “blogging and journalism” was similarly perplexing. Checking “and” as the keyword produced a markedly different list than the raw phrase. The conjunction is important, but how it was used to weight the results was impenetrable to me.
Finally, it looks exactly like Google. It’s as though no one will put anything on a search page besides a logo and search field. Imagine, one of these days someone will launch a search engine with, oh I don’t know, two search fields or a vertical banner; then, it will be a new world, at last.]]>