Gigablast Search Engine Optimization Advice

The search engine Gigablast is actually still in Beta, as it has been since 2001. The engine is designed to index up to 200,000,000,000 pages (that’s 200 billion web pages).

The engine is the brainchild of Matt Wells. While a graduate student at New Mexico Tech, he developed and implemented a site called The Artists’ Den in 1996. It was on Yahoo‘s ‘What’s Cool’ twice, on Netscape’s ‘What’s New’ once, and was also a semi-permanent feature on Infoseek’s Reference page.

In October of 1997 he started working with the search team at Infoseek in Sunnyvale, California. In 1999 he left and started writing the Gigablast search engine from scratch in C++.

According to Matt Wells, Gigablast, although still in beta, is presently serving out over 500,000 queries a day. At the time of this writing, March 2003, they are also in the midst of an overhaul of their algorithms, designed to significantly improve the accuracy of results, and the speed at which the engine is able to return results.

One interesting feature, very different from all of the other engines, is the end user’s ability to ‘see’ the engine indexing web pages almost as it happens. Watch the index size increasing in real time by visiting the site and hitting the reload button in your browser while you are on the front page. When I started writing this piece there were 150,274,160 pages indexed. By the time I finished, about 20 minutes had passed and there were 150,276,928 pages indexed.

One other extremely interesting feature this engine publicizes is that if a web site links to the Gigablast.com site, it will receive a boost in the search engine rankings. When considering search engine optimization for this engine, it may be wise to try the ‘gigaboost’ feature out, if you would like to take advantage of their traffic. This ‘Gigaboost’ is a play on the standard reciprocal links measuring stick. It probably helps with Gigablast’s ‘PageRank’ within Google too!. Here’s the quote from Gigablast.

  • Now, when your web page contains a link to gigablast.com it will receive a Gigaboost in the search results.
  • A Gigaboost will give your page an advantage in the search results rankings.
  • Whenever your web page ties in rank with another web page, your web page will be given the higher rank.
  • Ties happen a surprising number of times and the Gigaboost advantage can really help.
  • If you’ve recently added a link to Gigablast.com you may need to resubmit your page to Gigablast.com using the add url interface.
  • Pages that have search boxes in html forms submitting to http://www.gigablast.com/cgi/0.cgi also receive Gigaboosts.
  • Copy and paste the following html code into your web page to display a link to the Gigablast Search EngineSearch the Web

    At present this search engine does not receive data from any other engines, nor does it supply data to any.