accoona improves its interface?

Accoona is a search engine that I've written about in the past and have been quite positive about, both in my weblog and in my search engine column over at Ariadne.  They've now 'improved' the interface, but quite how they think this is an improvement is a bit of a puzzle to me. They've got rid of the 3 search options of web, news, business, and have just gone for one box. One of the strengths of Accoona was the ability to do a specific search very quickly, and I liked the ability to do a one click search from the start.

I now have to do this in a two stage process. The results are all delivered on one page with a brief news and business result at the top of the screen, and then the web results expanded by default below that. More importantly, the 'SuperTarget your search' which is the real strength of this search engine defaults to the web version, even when I collapse the other options, and expand the news option. In order to get the full options available in the SuperTarget function I now have to click on the news tab at the top of the screen! So in actual fact, the functionality to really target my news search with one click is now a three click process. I'm sorry - is this supposed to be an improvement?

There's also an 'Accoona Answers' for some queries which I was quite excited about, until I realised that the link just pulls in content from Wikipedia. Not >really< Accoona Answers, is it lads?

Sorry - but this 'improvement' simply doesn't work - it's made my searches more cumbersome, and I'm really disappointed - didn't you check this with *anyone* before you released this? Please, go back and rip it out; this is not good.

Comments

[Karen Blakeman]

Agree entirely Phil. In fact I didn't get past the home page. I assumed that because news was no longer a search option it had been discontinued. So will a lot of other people. Totally daft and idiotic and I have emailed them to that effect.