Gigablast

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Gigablast is an online search engine run by Matt Wells. Wells was employed by Infoseek until 2000 when he decided to run his own search engine and wrote the code for Gigablast from scratch. It aims to be an efficient search engine alternative to its larger competition, being able to store a large number of cached pages on a given server.

Overview
Gigablast aims to a high number of webpages per server.

Gigablast has an index of approximately 10 billion web pages and serves millions of queries per day. Gigablast also can search pages in various languages; entering a search in a language other than English brings up results in the language of the search.

Features
Gigabits is a Gigablast feature providing keywords related to user-provided search terms at the top of the results page. This is often useful for getting quick answers to certain questions. For example, a search for "Who is the president of Cuba?" shows Gigabits mentioning Fidel Castro Ruz. The results may represent correlation more than definition and provide neither authoritative nor perfectly reliable answers to arbitrary questions. For example, the query "Who is President of the United States?" yields "Bush" as the third keyword after "Congress," "Constitution" and "America."

Gigablast supports nested boolean search logic using parenthesis and infix notation, a feature which is notably absent from competitors' engines.

Other features of Gigablast are the ability to view cached versions of a page, the ability to view old versions of a web page, a search within the Open Directory Project, and the ability to transfer a search to other popular search engines, namely Google, , MSN, and Ask.com.

Gigablast is able to search web pages, images, videos, and directories.

Gigablast also offers the Gigablast Toolbar, currently in beta, for Internet Explorer. The toolbar is able to search within a web page, search within a web site, search sites linked to from the web page, and search within bookmarked sites.

In February 2008, Gigablast revamped their engine, introducing new features. Among those are the ability to narrow down search results to a given time frame using a side-bar and an in-search "Family Filter" option.

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