untangling_the_web

DID: 4046925
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Gigablast
The Gigablast search engine, which has been around since 2002, is still not quite in
the same league as powerhouses Google, Yahoo, and Live Search, but it is well on
its way to becoming one of the best search engines. That's something of a surprise
given Gigablast's humble origins and unique status among major search engines. In
case you're not familiar with Gigablast, it is different from its major competitors most
notably because it is still owned and largely run by the guy who first wrote its C++
code in 2000. Matt Wells is still the very hands-on proprietor of Gigablast. Its
database now indexes over 2 billion pages, up from 650 million in late 2004.
While this falls short of the size of the Google, Yahoo, and Live Search databases,
it's not bad, especially considering a lot of the "stuff' in those databases is dross and
the numbers are not verified independently.
How does Gigablast stack up to the big boys? Gigablast has some very nice
features, some of which are unique to it, such as the IP range search (something
AlltheWeb once offered).
Gigablast
http://www.gigablast.com/
Strengths
~ simple interface
~ cached copies with date indexed [archived copies]
~ cached copies of webpages without images [stripped]
~ links to Internet Archives [older copies]
~ clusters results by default (can be turned off)
~ no limit on number of search terms
~ file types indexed include Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, as well as
PDF, PostScript, HTML, and text; syntax is:
o type:pdf for Adobe Acrobat PDFs
o type:doc for Microsoft Word documents
o type:ppt for PowerPoint presentations
o type:xls for Excel spreadsheets
o type:ps for PostScript files
o type:text for ASCII text files
o type:html for HTML Web pages
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