The American search engine Accoona has just been taken over by the international B2B search engine Masterseek, which was founded in Denmark in 1999.

Accoona received great attention upon its launch in 2004, when the former US President Bill Clinton was the speaker at its opening. Accoona has since achieved particular success in China, where Accoona has supplied the search function to Sina.com, Sohu and the China Daily News.

In 2006 Accoona was elected by Time magazine as one of the 50 best websites. Last year Accoona planned a flotation at 700 million USD on London’s Aim Tech. However, this was not realised due to the hard pressed market for raising capital.

The Accoona search service and domain names have now been sold to the Masterseek Corp. “We have worked intensely for the last two weeks in order to get all of the legalities and finances in place for the takeover and there is still a great deal of work in front of us to integrate and re-launch the search service,” states Rasmus Refer, founder of Masterseek.

The implementation and integration of data will take a couple of weeks before we are in a position to re-launch Accoona. Until then, a beta version will be available under http://www.accoona.com offering a simple company search function. The new version will contain a significantly greater amount of company information and more varied search facilities.

Accoona will initially be re-launched in the USA and China, which are our largest markets, but during January the search engine will also be launched throughout Europe in conjunction with the launch of the new expanded search functionality. With the acquisition of Accoona, Masterseek will fortify itself in its fight to become one of the largest B2B search engines in the world. The acquisition means that Masterseek will improve its company data and at the same time increase the number of its users.

Source: Masterseek Corp.

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