Gigablast is an American

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

web search engine A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...

and

directory Directory may refer to: * Directory (computing), or folder, a file system structure in which to store computer files * Directory (OpenVMS command) * Directory service, a software application for organizing information about a computer network' ...

. Founded in 2000, it is an independent engine and

web crawler A Web crawler, sometimes called a spider or spiderbot and often shortened to crawler, is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web and that is typically operated by search engines for the purpose of Web indexing (''web s ...

, developed and maintained by Matt Wells, a former

Infoseek Infoseek (also known as the "big yellow") was an American internet search engine founded in 1994 by Steve Kirsch. Infoseek was originally operated by the Infoseek Corporation, headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. Infoseek was bought by The Wa ...

employee and

New Mexico Tech The New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (New Mexico Tech and formerly New Mexico School of Mines) is a public university in Socorro, New Mexico. It offers over 30 bachelor of science degrees in technology, the sciences, engineering, man ...

graduate. The search engine

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the ...

is written in the programming languages C and

C++ C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...

. It was released as

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. ...

under the Apache License version 2, in July 2013. In 2015, Gigablast claimed to have indexed over 12 billion web pages, and received billions of queries per month. Gigablast has provided, and provides, search results to other companies, such as Ixquick,

Clusty Yippy was a metasearch engine that grouped searched results into clusters. It was originally developed and released by Vivísimo in 2004 under the name Clusty, before Vivisimo was later acquired by IBM and Yippy was sold in 2010 to a company now c ...

Zuula Zuula was a metasearch engine that provides search results from a number of different search engines. Zuula can be used to carry out standard web searches, image searches, video searches, news searches, blog searches, and job searches. Results a ...

, Snap, Blingo, and

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...

Background

Matt Wells worked for the

search engine until he left in 1999, to start working on what would become Gigablast, coding everything from scratch in

. It was originally designed to index up to 200 billion web pages. Gigablast went into

beta Beta (, ; uppercase , lowercase , or cursive ; grc, βῆτα, bē̂ta or ell, βήτα, víta) is the second letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 2. In Modern Greek, it represents the voiced labiod ...

form on July 21, 2002.

Features

Gigablast supports various specialized searches and

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operators. It also supports a related-concepts feature called ''Giga Bits'' and a blog-search feature. A feature called Gigabits provides relevant information in addition to what the user is searching for. Gigablast also claims to be, as of 2010, the "leading"

clean energy Clean may refer to: * Cleaning, the process of removing unwanted substances, such as dirt, infectious agents, and other impurities, from an object or environment * Cleanliness, the state of being clean and free from dirt Arts and media Music A ...

search engine with 90 percent of its power coming from

wind energy Wind power or wind energy is mostly the use of wind turbines to generate electricity. Wind power is a popular, sustainable, renewable energy source that has a much smaller impact on the environment than burning fossil fuels. Historically, w ...

Acquisition

In 2013, it was reported that Yippy had agreed to acquire Gigablast Inc. However, later on, Gigablast author Matt Wells said that no acquisition took place and that Gigablast remains independent.

Critical reception

In 2003, ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'' columnist Lee Dembart stated that "Gigablast has its adherents", but opined that

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

is "head and shoulders" above it, and adds that Google's search results are more complete. In 2016, a ''

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'' reviewer felt that Gigablast is easy to use and liked the Gigabits feature.

References

Bibliography

* * * Mary Ellen Bates, "Gigablast Blasts Off Again", ''

Online In computer technology and telecommunications, online indicates a state of connectivity and offline indicates a disconnected state. In modern terminology, this usually refers to an Internet connection, but (especially when expressed "on line" ...

'', May/Jun 200
abstract

Scan of Business 2.0 coverage of Matt Wells and Gigablast

External links

* {{Web search engines navbox Internet search engines Companies based in New Mexico Free search engine software Software using the Apache license