Gigablast was an American free and open-source web search engine and web directory. Founded in 2000, it was an independent engine and web crawler,
The open-source search engine source code is written in the programming languages C and C++. It was released as open-source software under the Apache License version 2, in July 2013.
The Gigablast engine provided search results to other companies at various times, including Ixquick,
Background
Matt Wells worked for the
Infoseek search engine until he left in 1999, to start working on what would become Gigablast, coding everything from scratch in C++. It was originally designed to index up to 200 billion web pages.
Gigablast went into
beta release on July 21, 2002.
Features
Gigablast supported various specialized
Search algorithm and
Boolean algebra operators.
It also supported a related-concept feature called
Giga Bits and a blog-search feature.
A feature called Gigabits provided relevant information in addition to what the user was searching for.
Gigablast also claimed to be, as of 2010, the "leading" clean energy search engine with 90 percent of its power coming from wind energy.
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 remained independent.
Critical reception
In 2003,
The New York Times columnist Lee Dembart stated that "Gigablast has its adherents", but opined that
Google is "head and shoulders" above it, and adds that Google's search results are more complete.
In 2016, a
Lifewire reviewer felt that Gigablast is easy to use and liked the Gigabits feature.
See also
-
List of search engines
-
Search engine
-
Comparison of search engines
Bibliography
External links
