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Review of Gigablast

Last updated Jul. 12, 2023.
by Greg R.

Debuting in beta form July 21, 2002 and in pre-beta in March 2002, this newer search engine has some very nice features. It lacks some advanced search features, but it does include cached pages, good date reporting, and as of Aug. 2003, PDF, Word, Powerpoint, PostScript, and Excel files. In Oct. 2003, Gigablast added indexing of all generic meta tags. Use the table of contents on the left to navigate this review.

Databases:
Gigablast has one single database of indexed Web pages including PDF, Microsoft Word, Powerpoint, PostScript, and Excel files. No additional databases or portal features are available at this time. No other sites are using Gigablast yet except a Scandinavian version at gigablast.nu and a few meta search engines.

Strengths:
  * Date reporting (including date indexed and date last modified)
  * Cached pages and links to the Wayback Machine
  * Includes PDF and other file types and cached HTML versions of these other file types
  * Indexing and displaying of meta tags

Weaknesses:
  * Small database and not refreshed as frequently as others
  * Lacks truncation, proximity, and other advanced search features.

Default Operation:
Multiple search terms are processed as an AND operation by default. So adding more terms should get fewer results. The relevance ranking algorithm generally puts phrase matches highest. At the end of a results list, Gigablast will offer a "No more results found. Show relevant partial matches for your query." which will run an OR operation.

Boolean Searching:
Full Boolean and implied Boolean searching is available. The + can be placed directly in front of a term to require it, like a Boolean AND while the - can be placed directly in front of a term to exclude it like a Boolean NOT. Allows only the use of a + for AND and - for NOT. As of Sept. 2003, the Boolean operators (which must be in uppercase) AND, OR, and AND NOT can be used and can be nested using parentheses. The advanced search has separate lines for ALL, ANY, and NONE. One unique advanced technique available is that by putting two spaces between terms phrase matches are excluded.

Proximity Searching:
Phrase searching is available by using "double quotes" around a phrase or entering terms into the "this exact phrase" box on the advanced search form, which actually has two such boxes such that two phrases can be specified. No further proximity searching is available.

Truncation:
No truncation is currently available.

Case Sensitivity:
Searches are not case sensitive. Search terms entered in lowercase, uppercase, or mixed case all get the same number of hits.

Field Searching:

Limits:
Gigablast has only a few limits, available by using the field searches above or the advanced search page. For a domain limit, use "site" and for a file type limit, use the type: command.

Stop Words:
Gigablast does ignore very common words such as  'the', 'of', 'and', 'it,' 'is,' and 'or'. However, they will be searched if preceded by a + or if they are included within a phrase search. Originally they had no stop words.

Sorting:
By defaults, results are sorted in order of relevance score. The advanced search also used to have an option for date sorting, but that was gone by Oct. 2003. Site clustering is turned on by default, so only one page per site is displayed. This can be turned off in the advanced search.

Display:
Gigablast displays the title, a 1-2 line keyword-in-context extract, the URL, file size, a link to a cached copy of the page as it looked when Gigablast crawled it, the date crawled, and the reported last modification date of the page, if any is given. Ten results at a time are displayed, although the advanced search gives an option for up to 50. In addition, Gigablast can display specified meta tags in the results list. See below for details. 

Unique:
Meta Tag Searching and Display: Gigablast is the only search engine indexing meta tags beyond just the meta description and meta keywords that some others index. It is the only search engine that can also display meta tags in the results list. Gigablast claims to be indexing all "generic" meta tags. In addition, it 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 a &dt= followed by the word(s) for the meta tags, followed by a colon, and then a number to represent how many characters from each meta tag should be displayed. So, for example, adding &dt=keywords+author+generator+description:30, will display the meta tag content for meta keywords, meta author, meta generator, and meta description tags for any records retrieved. Use a + between meta tag words. It seems that this "generic" meta tag approach excludes more complex meta tags like Dublin Core which use a syntax like DC.Creator. The dot syntax will not work for the display command, although Gigablast does index some of the content of these tags.

Date Display: It also is the only search engine that clearly displays the date it crawled a Web page and the date reported by the Web page at the time it was crawled. And, a unique feature: by putting two spaces between terms, phrase matches are excluded.

Documentation:

• Help
• About Gigablast
• Blog

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