

Forget Cuil, check this out: one guy and a bunch of pcs - jacquesm
http://gigablast.com/

======
mixmax
From the about page: _"Now Gigablast has grown to several, highly-talented
employees"_ So not quite one guy.

That said, after having read some of the comments on the page I think we
should cut the guy (or guys) some slack. As jacquesm's link points out 55% of
users in a double blind study found gigablast better than Google. We're
talking about a couple of guys matching, and maybe beating, one of the worlds
biggest software companies at their own game. A couple of guys matching
Google's thousands of employees and thousands of servers.

In a word I think they're absolutely fucking awesome and deserve total and
absolute respect.

~~~
johnrob
If they are better than google and nobody cares, that is a frightening
thought.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Are they better than google at search (which is what I think you meant)?

Can they scale what they have to serve the number of SERPs that Google serves?
Can they do that cost effectively? Can their algorithms produce as useful
results in the face of "optimisations" by 10's of thousands of SEO/SEMs across
the globe?

I'm guessing no.

My wife makes the most awesome gingerbread men (and brownies) but that doesn't
mean she can put Greggs out of business.

Still props too them, they're doing something awesome.

------
sown
I interviewed there once. Smart people; demanding, too. By that, I mean that
I'm sure all of you would find it to be a rewarding and challenging workplace.

They made it clear that there was no VC money. Classic bootstrap. Matt wrote
most of the original code base himself. I seem to remember they had at least
several employees.

~~~
tdziuba
Ah yeah, the old work-for-equity scam. Classic sign that the company is going
nowhere.

~~~
didip
What make you assumed that bootstrapping company does work-for-equity scam?
There are always other ways of bringing in money without venture funds.

------
die_sekte
In terms of relevance there seems to be a tie between gigablast and cuil
(according to my highly unscientific study). And google search is still
better. And I like cuil's design more.

~~~
jacquesm
In '08 they did a double blind study comparing gigablast with google and two
thirds of the users preferred gigablast.

It's a dated study of course, and I can't find a reference for it (which
doesn't help) but it impressed me quite a bit.

edit: found a link: [http://www.searchenginejournal.com/gigablast-better-than-
goo...](http://www.searchenginejournal.com/gigablast-better-than-google-or-
askcom-according-to-study/6551/)

I misremembered the percentage though, not 66 but 55.

~~~
michaelfairley
This study has an inherent flaw: the queries used were selected from the most
common queries. Answering common queries is (relatively) easy, but Google
claims (and other independent studies have shown) that Google is much much
better than most of its competition for returning good results for uncommon
queries (the "long tail" if you will).

Edit: I just (briefly) tested this myself. Searching for for my username on
Gigablast returned 3 results: 2 of my HN comments and a wordlist. Google on
the other hand found 3k results, with the top results being my linkedin and
facebook profiles (which I would deem the "best results").

~~~
die_sekte
Can't agree more with that. I searched for some Cocoa part which was a tie
between Google and Gigablast; a torrent which Gigablast could find, but at its
origin; and the AD&D Sorcerer which Gigablast couldn't find anything about.

Gigablast might have better results for common queries, but those matter
hardly to the typical HN user.

------
hwijaya
They definitely deserve some merits.

IMHO, though, i think the normal search engine becomes more like a marketing
game now. Same as "most people prefer something other than Coca-Cola in blind
test", yet they are still the biggest seller by far.

Unless something is changing in the landscape that affect users behavior (like
social web - led by FB, Twitter etc), i wouldn't expect anyone can win against
Google in this game without MUCH higher value propositions.

~~~
jacquesm
I'm not so sure.

Search is funny that way, you know instantly if a search engine is 'good' or
'fluff'. Most engines out there today are very comparable wrt to the quality
of the results, some are better in one domain, others are less susceptible to
spammers but overall there is not that much difference, it's comparable to
different tastes in icecream. EDIT: once you've got a user they're not likely
to switch away from their favourite flavour, it's what they're used to.

But if some group came along that quietly and without fuss presented you with
a search engine that had exactly what you were looking at on page one _every
time_ I think the current crop would fade faster than you could say
'altavista'.

~~~
hwijaya
That's what makes technology industry interesting. Things are quite
unpredictable and like it or not, none of us knows exactly how things will pan
out.

Google's strength is obviously in brand penetration when it comes to search
engine. After all, most people outside us hardly even know about "Google
Chrome" after making such a huge splash all over the place.
(<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ>).

So, i wouldn't expect them to type in www.cuil.com or WolframAlpha without
something is changing in the landscape that alter user behavior.

------
keltex
Seems like the last bit of news was from 2005:

<http://gigablast.com/press.html>

I wonder what he's been doing for the last 4 years?

~~~
jacquesm
I haven't a clue, but it seems like the site has been a pretty constant
performer, I have never seen it 'down', it looks like he has about 50K uniques
every day.

------
doodyhead
You have to admire his accomplishment, but the presentation grates on me --
the fonts are pretty unreadable and it all seems very rough around the edges.
Even if the standard were up to Google's, I wouldn't use it for that reason
alone.

~~~
moe
Interestingly the fonts are actually more readable to me than google's
(slightly bigger, slightly more kerning). Perhaps he's only testing on linux -
and I'm also on linux.

------
sgrytoyr
They should fix their frontpage if they want to impress international users. I
was thoroughly unimpressed when I searched for my last name ('grytøyr') and
saw that it became 'gryt?yr' and included search results for 'gryt'.

However, searching for the same from the result page works, so it appears to
be just a charset bug with the frontpage (which I’ve notified them about).

------
jonknee
> Gigablast databases are scalable to 200 billion pages with minimal hardware.
> (100,000 servers)

While that's obviously a ton of pages, I've just never heard someone call
100,000 servers a minimal amount of hardware. Different points of view I
suppose.

~~~
jacquesm
In the 'rants' ( <http://www.gigablast.com/rants.html> ) there is a lot of
background information, he says he originally released when he had only 8
servers.

Also, there is no way he has 100,000 servers, he never took in outside
capital. I think that part should be read as 'it scales to 100,000 servers),
probably wildly optimistic since I highly doubt there is a gigablast
implementation anywhere that has that many servers.

------
pclark
> Gigablast plans to be the best and most popular search engine on the
> internet within the next year and if you are interested in being part of
> such a business then this is the place for you!

Copyright © 2000-2005 Gigablast, Inc

------
redorb
while clicking around this reminds me of early google, however after a few
results - I can already strongly suggest ways to game the system, first it
ranks to heavy off of keywords in the domain name etc..

~~~
conorgil
I used gigablast for a couple of searches and it just didn't give me the
results I was looking for. I think I will stick with google until I find
something that is _consistantly_ more reliable

~~~
jacquesm
You nailed it there, that is the key. And when such a thing comes around we'll
see how strong that google brand really is.

------
tybris
Well, it passed the ego-search test with grace. I almost thought people had
given up on a search. There's just so much more you can do than what Google
does.

------
wenbert
I liked the subnavigation "Giga Bits" link.

