The Business to Business (B2B) search engine Accoona has been acquired by the international B2B search engine Masterseek. Masterseek was founded in Denmark in 1999.

Accoona got a lot of press back in 2004 when it launched. I’m not sure if you remember, but President Bill Clinton was the speaker at the opening. Over the years, Accoona has been fairly successful in China, where Accoona has supplied the search function to both Sina.com and Sohu. Accoona has an exclusive partnership with China’s most widely-read daily newspaper, the China Daily News.

In 2006, Accoona was chosen by Time magazine as one of the 50 best websites.

In this latest deal, the Accoona search service and the Accoona domain names have now been sold to the Masterseek Corporation.

As a part of the deal, Accoona will be integrated with Masterseek and they will re-launch Accoona in a few weeks. Until they re-launch, a beta version is available at Accoona.com with a simple company search facility. After the re-launch, a new version will have “a significantly greater amount of company information and more varied search facilities.”

Accoona will initially be re-launched in the USA and China. In January, they plan on launching it throughout Europe in conjunction with the launch of a 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 significantly increase the number of its users.

Masterseek provides free access to company profiles, products and services from more than 50 million companies in 75 countries.