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Nearly 4 months ago, it was announced that Activision had shut down the fan-made game based on Sierra's King's Quest series, The Silver Lining, reneging on a deal made by the developers with then-copyright-owners Vivendi Univeral. A lot of fans, including myself, were outraged at this decision. The TSL team had already named itself Phoenix Online Studios and that name may yet be appropriate. The mythical bird would die in flame, but then be reborn from its own ashes. A commenter alerted me to something stirring on the official TSL site.
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During the fifth week of my search experiment, I have used Cuil as my primary search engine. Cuil is apparently pronounced "cool", although, like with Teoma (pronounced "chawmuh") I really can't bring myself to say it that way – to me it looks French and I keep thinking "queel" in my head. Anyway, the odd name aside, Cuil was launched with great fanfare as a "Google killer". That is quite the bold ambition and if you want to beat Google at their own game, you had better bring some seriously innovative ideas to the table. Even more important than great ideas is a great, near flawless implementation of those ideas. This is where Cuil not just falls short, but fails miserably.
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In my search engine experiment, the last week of April was for Yahoo!. From the list, that is the oldest search engine I have ever used. It started out not so much as a search engine, but differentiated itself by being a directory, where links were organised into categories. Of course, the web has grown explosively and it is no longer feasible to keep everything organised this way, but Yahoo! has maintained its portal function and remains one fo the most visited sites on the web.
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Another week, another search engine. In the fourth week of April, I have tried out Duck Duck Go as primary search engine. In the line-up of search engines that I'm trying out, Duck Duck Go and Cuil are the newest and also the most different from the mainstream search engines. Although I admit to dreading Cuil week, in Duck Duck Go's case these seem to be positive differences. DDG takes some getting used to and it lacks some of the extra features offered by the major players, but once you do get used to it, it works well and is actually fun to use. So much fun, in fact, that I ended up making lots of notes and this may be one of the longest posts I'll ever write.
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The previous week was the second in my search experiment. From the twelfth through the eighteenth of April, I have once again used Google as primary search engine. Now, the reason I switched away from Google for search was not because of the quality of Google's search result. Those are generally excellent and sufficiently unobtrusive most of the time that I don't even give it a second thought. Because of this, this post actually took quite a while to write.
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