Gigablast is an independent search engine with various unique features. It allows very specific constructed searches, which should appeal to researchers, and searches of particular document types like .doc, .xls, .ps, and .pdf. It also has the dmoz directory, and an Ask.com-like question answering service. We tried the query 'How old is Britney Spears?. Answer: "The following query words were ignored How, is" ; and the sites listed didn't give her age. Oh well.

One interesting feature of the search results listings is the ability to see a cached version of the target page "stripped" of images and ads, with just the text as the spider sees the page. This also gives the date the page was spidered by Gigablast. Most of the sites we checked had not been spidered by Gigablast for about a year, which is troubling.

1. Commercial product - digital cameras

The search results include suggestions for other related popular searches. Unless we are missing something, there appear to be no ads in the search results at all. The results for this search term were fairly good, but the extracted page snippets didn't throw much light on the relevancy of the pages.

2. Commercial product actual model - a product brand + model name

We used the search term Sony cybershot. The search algorithm did not realise we really wanted the 'Sony Cyber-Shot' (the correct name has a hyphen), though it did use the term in its suggested additional search phrases. Nor did the Sony home page appear on page 1 of the results, which also had duplicated results. It was worrying how often two year old pages appeared there too.

3. Commercial purchase - buy CDs

Well, they have 28 million related pages in their database but the results on page 1 were extremely poor and none of the top online music retailers actually featured at all. In addition, most of the results seemed to have been spidered a year ago or longer.

4. Entertainment - Naomi Campbell

The results for this search were reasonably good, with the official site at the top, and a good selection of additional Naomi Campbell search phrases.

5. Entertainment - games cheats

Search engines often use transparent results targetting based on the international or local location of the searcher - in other words, depending on where you are located, you will see a different set of pure results or ads. For some reason Gigablast decided we were interested in .uk results for this search - 8 of the 10 listings were .uk domains. As we are not in the UK, this was an error, and this arbitrary filtering limited the usefulness of the listings considerably.

6. Precise requirement - Berkeley sociology

The required site was at the top of the search listings.

7. Precise requirement - Dublin Ireland hotel

Though there were no commercial sponsored ads, the results here were good and relevant.

8. Precise / Travel - New York London airfare

With a search like this a user simply wants to be shown sites with current deals and fares, for the trip specified. Though a few of the results on page one seemed relevant, the age of most of the results was disappointing, while the relevance of the results was also suspect - some of them did not seem particularly relevant to London at all.

9. Research - asthma information

While the results for this search were adequate, it was obvious that the Gibablast ranking algorithm was giving too much weight to sites which had the search term in the domain name and in the page title. In addition there was a "We've moved" listing from a year in the past, which doesn't say a lot about the freshness of the results.

10. Research - Iraq maps

The results were fairly good, but we don't need a snippet stating "You must have a frames-compatible browser to view this page".

11. Searching - Dogpile.com

We got the site we wanted here.

12. Searching - Ask Jeeves

The Ask.com site was listed as it should be, taken from the Open Directory results.

Summary:

While Gigablast has a lot of interesting features and options, the results it gives for most searches don't seem as relevant as they should be. In addition, their database needs to be updated much more regularly. The inclusion of system messages (instead of text from the target page) in the page snippets which are meant to guide the searcher is simply not acceptable if Gigablast really intends to challenge the big boys of the search world.

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