inter:digital strategies

Barry Schwartz, of Search Engine Roundtable, posted a short note at Search Engine Journal today about theAccoona search engine. Accoona describes itself as an "Artificial Intelligence Search Engine" - which seems like it may be a bit glorified, to me.

The basis of its so-called Artificial Intelligence technology is that the search engine learns to "learns to ‘understand’ the meaning of words, so users can ’super-target’ keywords during searches for relevant results in priority order." (ABC News) In my brief play time with the search engine, I saw no particular evidence of any behavior which was different from any other search engine, however. Perhaps they haven’t launched this technology yet - the article above, from ABCnews.com, didn’t clearly specify this, although it did state that Accoona was expecting to "upgrade its American portal and to launch across Europe within 2 months."
(A rather ambiguously phrased statement.)

Regardless, I saw nothing inherent to the search engine to say that it was a bad search. The results I got in my test searches were more or less what I had expected.
Yet, there are grounds for being "anti-Accoona" - thus the creation of sites such as Accoona Sucks. It has little to do with the quality of their search, and a lot to do with some underhanded marketing techniques found on a few forums.

Forum marketing is a scary world, though - the fact is, there are entire companies dedicated to marketing in web forums. I can’t say I approve of this kind of underhanded behavior. A forum is intended as a place where people can present their honest opinions, and can assume that what they are reading is somebody’s honest opinion. To be paid to post on a forum seems a long way away from best practice marketing.

I can’t easily judge what really happened with these forum posts - perhaps Accoona was acting in bad faith, perhaps an employee went overboard. However, on the whole, Accoona is going to get a thumbs down from me - from boredom, if nothing else. The search engine just doesn’t seem to have anything unique to offer. Maybe later.

A while back, I was talking a lot about vertical search engines - and I believe I mentioned that I was thinking of writing up something more permanent on the topic.

Well, today I posted a new article on that very subject.

Enjoy!

This comes from a rare occurrence - me agreeing with a post at I Hate Google.org. I do not hate Google - and, to be frank, I usually seriously disagree with the author on most points. However, his responses to this anti-Google stock post are quite sensible.

The simple fact is that there is no logical justification for Google’s current stock price. Even after the dive it’s taken in the last several months the valuation seems unnaturally high. The company is priced as if it were in a high-margin industry. However, Google is definitely not high-margin! They earn their income by the penny-per-click model just like anyone running an AdSense based income site.

Both the above articles (otherwise from sites I wouldn’t necessarily recommend), make the big point that "search is in its infancy". This shouldn’t be ignored! New search engines are popping up every month, trying to carve out their niche in vertical search, or playing with their own spiders and algorithms. Who’s to say when one of these new players will suddenly catch the eye of the public and grab a share of the market?

It’s not just new, small players who are striving for a share, as well - Ask.com, with its latest expansions in Europe and highly competitive mapping tool is clearly positioning itself for a move forward in arena of search combat.

I’m not suggesting, necessarily, that you actually dump all your Google stock. However, I wouldn’t expect any huge profits off of it anytime soon. It’s far more likely to continue falling, in my view. I’m far from an expert on stock values - but this position seems like it cannot be held for long.