Gigablast Category Archive
Customizing Search Engines and Searching State Libraries
For one of my upcoming columns in Online, I compared the various custom search engines and other tools for building a topical search engine from a subset of a major search engine's database. Tools like Gigablast Custom Topic Search, Google Custom Search Engine, Live Search Macros, Swickis, Rollyo, and Yahoo! Search Builder. I compared a number of features (including the maximum number of sites, whether they support subdirectories, and if they have usage statistics). This information can now be seen on my new Customize Your Own Search Engine page....
HereUAre, Gigablast, 10 Billion, and Spam
Ever heard of HereUAre, which has "Over 10 billion pages indexed?" Try a search and you may recognize the results as coming from Gigablast. So what's the connection? This leads to a rather strange story of a vanished press release that I've been researching on and off for the past month or so. Here's the story. In trying to update my site awhile back, I came across one page that linked to a June 19, 2006 press release from Gigablast about a database size increase to 10 billion and a new "report as spam" feature. The linked page (beta.gigablast.com/prnew.html) was...
Government on Gigablast
Although the site was available in April, according to some, presumably in experimental form, today the Government Search tab has been linked on the main Gigablast page. The government search covers U.S. state, federal, and military sites but it is broader than just a top level domain limit....
Gigablast Adds Travel and Blog Search
Gigablast adds two new tabs: Travel and Blog Search. These new specialized search offerings are available from the main page and do not just restrict to specific portions of the main Gigablast database. Some unique items may be retrieved in each of these specialized databases that may not show up in the main database. The exact scope of each collection is not yet explained. The scope may seem a bit strange, as when the blog search includes some non-blog pages....
Related Pages at Gigablast
Gigablast announces the addition of related pages results on searches. These appear in a yellow box above the regular results and are supposed to include "highly relevant search results which do not necessarily contain the searchers query terms." The list of related pages can be expanded by clicking on the "more" link in the yellow box. While the initial suggestions for several searches I tried all seem to contain my search terms, expanding the list found others that did not. The exact method used to find these related pages is not specified, but it provides another way to search laterally...
Gigablast Grows Again
Gary noticed that Gigablast now reports that it is searching 1,500,103,760 pages (up from the previous 1,014,325,120.)...
One Billion at Gigablast
From 640 million pages up to 1,014,363,952, Gigablast continues to grow and push at increasing its database size and scope....
XML Search Feeds from Gigablast
Gigablast announces the availability of XML search feeds. This is likely most useful when combined with their Site Search or Custom Topic Search options. For the XML wizards, see the full instructions on how to create and customize these feeds....
Gigablast Expands Site Search
Gigablast has expanded its site search offering that it first introduced in Sept. 2002. The new addition is the ability to get your pages added to the Gigablast site search index....
Customized Topical Searches from Gigablast
More innovation from Gigablast! Create your own mini-Gigablast search box that just searches sites (up to 200) that you specify. The sites can include a path to limit the search to just one directory tree of a specific site while include the full results from other sites. See the Custom Topic Search page for full details....
Gigablast Growth
Gigablast grows yet again, with over 640 million pages claimed as its new size. While it is still significantly smaller than the several billion pages at Google and Yahoo! Search, it is great to see continued growth and activity at this less well-known search engine....
Gigablast Defaults to AND
Sometime recently, Gigablast finally made the switch to a default AND operation, joining the default function of all the major search engines. Entering more than one word will automatically search for all the query terms. Gigablast review and the search engine features chart have been updated....
New Logo and Updated Database at Gigablast
Gigablast announces a modified logo and the addition of a new slogan, "Information Acceleration." Its database has been updated and is now at about 250 million records. It can also now default to an AND search, like all the major search engines. However, to get it to do that, you have to append &rat=1 to the end of the URL after a search. While the technique is impractical for most searchers, we can hope that the default AND will become an an option within a preference page and/or an advanced search choice sometime in the future. Hopefully, the advanced search...
Gigablast Adds Spelling Suggestions
Joining the other major search engines, Gigablast now has a spell checker which makes suggestions for correct (or just alternate) spellings of unusual query terms. Like most other search engines, these suggestions are displayed as "Did you mean. . .�" Matt Wells also offers a fascinating exploration of the spelling suggestions at other search engines in his announcement. Searching 'dooty' at several search engines he found no consistency in suggestions: AlltheWeb - booty Altavista - dhooti Gigablast - door Google - doody MS Word - Doty Teoma - doty And none gave what I would expect to be the obvious...
Gigablast Drops Date Sort
Sometime between June and October, Gigablast took away the option to sort by date on the advanced search form. As the only search engine to offer that option, it is a shame to see it disappear. At least Gigablast still reports the date indexed and the last modified date stamp as of the last crawl. Also, the Add URL page is "temporarily disabled." Gigablast review, features chart, and by features page all updated to reflect this and also the meta tag indexing and display at Gigablast....
Meta Tag Indexing at Gigablast
Gigablast makes another bold move -- indexing, searching, and displaying of all generic meta tags. Previously, some search engines would index words in a meta keyword or meta description tag. Some would use the meta description tag for the summary in the search engine results list. But none of the major search engines ever indexed any other meta tags. Now, Gigablast claims to be indexing all "generic" meta tags. In addition, Gigablast can display the meta tags in the results list. Doing this requires adding commands to the URL of the results list. At the end of the url, add...
Geo Meta Tags at Gigablast
Meta tags, originally introduced to the search space by AltaVista as way to get better descriptions of a Web page, were terribly abused by search engine spammers. Only the meta keywords and meta description tags were indexed, and only by some search engines. Now, Gigablast is introducing new meta tags and is daring to try again. This time, they are "geotags," meta tags for identifying the location of a Web site. According to the information page, the following meta tags are now indexed and supported at Gigablast: zipcode city state country author language classification Before this will become very useful,...
Update on Gigablast Boolean
The full Boolean capabilities of Gigablast announced on Monday don't always seem to work right. The - is working more accurately than either NOR or AND NOT today. I am hoping it is a momentary glitch since I just updated the Gigablast review, the search feature chart, and the search engines by search feature page....
Boolean at Gigablast
It may be a small search engine, but Gigablast keeps on innovating. Matt Wells announced today the support for Boolean operators at Gigablast: AND, OR, AND NOT, and OR NOT. It is also supposed to support nesting. It is available from the main page search box. Operators should be in all upper case....
More File Types at Gigablast
Three days after adding PDFs to Gigablast, Matt Wells announces the addition of PostScript (.ps) , PowerPoint (.ppt), Excel (.xls), and Microsoft Word (.doc) files. Search syntax is similar to the PDFs, using type: as in type:pdf for Adobe Acrobat PDFs type:doc for Microsoft Word documents type:ppt for PowerPoint presentations type:xls for Excel spreadsheets type:ps for PostScript files type:text for ASCII text files type:html for HTML Web pages These all seem to work, except for the PowerPoint one. I could not find any results for that search, but I expect that will be fixed soon. All of these file types...
PDFs on Gigablast
Matt Wells of Gigablast announces that "Gigablast now indexes PDF documents." To limit a search to PDF files, Gigablast uses a different command than the other search engines: Use type:pdf rather than the more standard 'filetype:'. To exclude PDF files, add type:text to a search. Matt also says that Gigablast "will support other file types in the future." Gigablast review updated. But remember, Gigablast defaults to OR, so a search like nutrition type:pdf is actually looking for any page with 'nutrition' OR and PDF file. The nutrition search finds zero results with both. To force it to work as expected,...
Gigablast Keyword Highlighting and OR
A few minor updates at Gigablast announced today include better keyword highlighting. The default of an OR on multi-word searches remains, unlike all major search engines and hearkening back to search engines of the late 1990s. However, they now put a teal bar at top or search engine results pages where the default OR was used which links to an explanation and states"The results below may not have all your query terms, but may be relevant. Try generalizing your query. [Info]" Sorry, but I think Gigablast just needs to default to AND like most people expect and the major search...
Gigablast 2.0
Matt Wells, creator of Gigablast, announces the release of Gigablast 2.0 which is supposed to double the speed of query responses, increase the importance of phrase matching in the relevance ranking, and started a full update to the database....
Gigablast Corporate Growth
Gigablast has moved beyond being just a one person operation. They now have a management team page with a new Chief Management Officer and Chief Scientist. I hope this means they have some funding and can expand the Gigablast database to include more pages and to refresh them much more frequently....
Gigablast Now in Sweden
New search engine Gigablast is starting to expand. Yesterday they launched a Swedish/Scandinavian version at gigablast.nu. It looks like the same database with the addition of a Swedish language limit. The design of the site is much nicer than gigablast.com but the advanced search does not have all the same options. They are accepting advertising which may well help to support continued development of Gigablast. More information is available on their About page....
Gigablast Now Offering Site Search
Gigablast may be around for awhile if it can make a go at offering site search to paying customers. The announcement appeared on their site today stating that "for a teeny fraction of the other guys' prices you can have an account on Gigablast.com that can support millions of web pages." Of course, the monthly price for a million page site still costs US$2,500....
New! GigaBlast in Beta
GigaBlast launched in beta today. While much smaller than the recently launched Openfind, it offers some nice advantages. It includes cached copies of the pages it indexes, like Google. It includes an advanced search, date sorting, field searching, and excellent reporting of both the date spidered and the last modified date. It does lack full Boolean, truncation, and other advanced search features. See the Search Engine Showdown review for more on its search features....
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