Well, everyone’s blog postings and emailed complaints to Accoona seem to have worked. Accoona has restored the web, news and business search options on its home page alongside the new ‘All’ option.

Accoona is a search engine that I regularly include in my workshops and training sessions, not so much for the web search but for the news section and the SuperTarget options. Yesterday, I was horrified to discover that News is no longer there. Instead of Web, Business and News there is just a single search box. Going through my feeds this morning, I see that Phil Bradley has picked up on this as well but has explored a little further than I had. News is still there but you first have to do a search in the box on the home page. When the results page comes up, the three options reappear and you can then limit your search to web, business or news. Why they have decided to increase the number of clicks I need to make to find the information I want beats me. They won’t gain any fans by doing it and will no doubt lose those who already use it for news. One look at the home page and they will assume, as I did, that the news service is no more.

Accoona have released a talking toolbar for Internet Explorer. As well searching the web and news sources via the Accoona web site, the toolbar converts any highlighted text on a web page into speech. The voice (Heather) is very life like and has so far coped very well with most things I have thrown at it, including acronyms such as CILIP, Aslib and UKeiG. I aimed it at the UKeiG management committee contact list and it did very well until it read our training coordinator Shaida Dorabjee’s details. The toolbar uses artificial intelligence, as does the search engine itself, to try and put words and abbreviations into context. In this case it decided that the SD of ‘SD Information Services’ stood for South Dakota! Whoops. It also had a few problems with the pronunciation of my address - Caversham, Berkshire - but then many humans get those wrong so I am not going to complain too much about that.

The “talking” part of the toolbar, which is an optional plug-in, was developed in collaboration with The China Daily Information Company (CDIC). CDIC says that it will help Chinese users, particularly students, advance their knowledge of spoken English through the Web but it obviously will help any foreign language students who are learning English and also people with a visual impairment.

The toolbar requires Microsoft Windows NT/ME/2000/XP and Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0+ . There have been complaints that it is classed as spyware by some privacy tools. I suspect that is because of the way it is capturing text on the screen for conversion to speech. I have a similar problem with my Pawsense program, which stops my cat messing up everything on my computer every time she sits on the keyboard. With Pawsense, it is the keystroke logging function that causes the mis-identification. Pawsense is certainly not a threat and I do not believe the Accoona toolbar is either.

With respect to installation, there have been reports of not being unable to un-install it. That was not a problem for me - in fact I had the opposite experience. The installation repeatedly told me I did not have admin rights, even though I was logged in as the administrator. I eventually solved it by unticking the option to have Accoona as my default search engine.

This is an interesting tool but not one that I am likely to use that often. Although I am a great fan of Accoona News, the toolbar is only available for Internet Explorer and I use Firefox. Nevertheless, I shall be watching this one to see how it develops.

I spotted this piece of news in the Alacra Blog - AlacraBlog: Accoona is Back.

Accoona was first released in December 2004 and failed to impress me and others. This new version is greatly improved, although the business search is just a D&B search on US companies. It is the News section that I find particularly interesting with its “SuperTarget Your Search” option. Publication coverage is excellent and includes a good range of industry sectors and international, regional and local sources. My standard test search on wind farms for example picked up the Taunton Gazette and Rutland Herald as well as The Guardian, Washington Post and a host of environmental publications.

Results can be sorted by date and relevance but the SuperTarget goes even further and enables you to narrow down your search by publisher, companies and people mentioned in the articles, country and state. The “When published” feature includes an option for “More than 30 days ago” but this does limit you to only those sources that offer free access beyond this date.

This is a worthy competitor to the free offerings from Google, Yahoo and Ask but it currently lacks an Alerts option.