I’m pleased that Accoona at least told us when it became defunct. There are some other search engines that haven’t been so forthcoming. They’re the "living dead" of search engines. The business search engine Knuru has been undergoing "maintenance" for months. It looks like it should be a live site, but it isn’t. It has several partners, including Ask and Moreover, so perhaps something is up with the agreements, but to put that maintenance excuse up for such a long time is deceptive.

I was going to include Podscope, the audio search engine, in this rant, but it suddenly started working again. For several weeks, it looked like a live search engine, but no term, not even a single word, such as ‘business,’ or ‘work,’ or ‘today’ yielded any hits. But this morning I found it was back — without, however, any explanation for the extended downtime. The copyright statement at the bottom of the page says 2005 and the latest blog post is from July 2006.

Then there’s Kartoo’s kvisu, which seems to have disappeared from the open web. A demo at Karoo’s site indicates it’s now enterprise only.  I liked the kvisu interface much better than Kartoo’s original one, so I wish it would come back from the dead.