Blog posts dated 2010 – Posts 6..10 of 21 posts found:

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.

Never thought I'd have a legitimate reason to call 112 (the European equivalent of 911), but I just did. About an hour ago (4 am or so), I went for an early morning walk... or rather a late night one as I couldn't sleep. Roughly halfway, I noticed what looked like a large bonfire in another street. This turned out to be a conifer hedge on fire.

The first week of my search experiment is over. For the past week, I've used Teoma as my primary search engine. Teoma (pronounced "chawmuh", although I really can't bring myself to say it that way) took a page from Google's book and adopted a minimalist interface while using sophisticated context-aware algorithms to rank pages. About a year after founding, Teoma was acquired by Ask Jeeves and it is now the technology behind Ask and related sites, all owned by IAC Search & Media.

Having been online since the mid '90s, I've used a variety of search engines. Even back then, the web was too large to find the stuff you needed quickly, so search engines played an important role in day to day internet use. I used AltaVista when it was still hosted at digital.com, Yahoo and Webcrawler, which integrated results from multiple search engines. With the exponential growth of the web, these search engines have become even more essential today. I think it was in 2000 when a colleague of mine told me about this little-known engine that was no-frills, fast and yielded great search results. It was called Google. For nearly 10 years, Google has been my primary search engine and I've never really been dissatisfied with it. Simply put, they do a terrific job at search.

I've been working a lot on the site structure lately and it is now time to make a few changes in the presentation department as well. The orange design this site had until just now dated back at least 6 years and was beginning to look rather dated.