Gigablast – Cyberzettel

Search Engines that Have Found this Site

This will be a running list.

Site created 4 August 2022. Launched around 8 August 2022. Very few inbound links.

As of 18 August 2022. Search was for “cyberzettel”

Bing – Yes. extensive crawling. Already got first SE hit via DuckDuckGo which relies on Bing. Still surprised.

Google – Yes. Several pages.

Yandex – No.

Mojeek – No.

Gigablast – No.

Brave – No.

Right Dao – No.

Yep – Yes. This really surprised me. Only one or two pages plus a couple of pages that link to or mention.

Alexandria – No.

Bonus Surprise –

Wiby.me – little Wiby.me did not have this site in their index because they don’t crawl the web. But they found two pages in their index that actually mentioned the site. So they do keep their index fresh. Cool.

This isn’t a critique of the search engines listed, but since I have a new site it presents an opportunity to test how fast these search engines find and index.

Bookmark: A look at search engines with their own indexes by Seirdy.

The three dominant English search engines with their own indexes^note 1 are Google, Bing, and Yandex (GBY). Many alternatives to GBY exist, but almost none of them have their own results; instead, they just source their results from GBY.

With that in mind, I decided to test and catalog all the different indexing search engines I could find. I prioritized breadth over depth, and encourage readers to try the engines out themselves if they’d like more information.

This is one of the best examinations of search engines with their own indexes, which are quite rare. Well worth the read.

Gigablast: Search Engine

Gigablast is a general web search engine with it’s own crawler and index. In Internet terms it’s been around since 2000 which is a long time.

Eventually Gigablast indexed 1 billion pages which was quite an accomplishment for a small search engine at the time. Then it seemed to stall out, I’m guessing for lack of funds. The index got stale and it seemed very dormant.

I never was impressed by the engine’s ranking algorithm, it always seemed like only 50% of the results had something to do with the query. There may have been work going on behind the scenes but to the outside it didn’t look active. To their credit they didn’t give up and die like so many others.

However, in 2022 I became aware that Gigablast had improved. So sometime over the last couple of years they rolled out changes. 1. the index feels bigger, fresher, 2. the relevance of the SERP’s seemed much better. All said, much more usable.

The website still says 1 billion pages, but my guess is it’s several times that. I use it as a second or third opinion in search.

Right now I’d put it after Mojeek but ahead of the other search engines with their own index and algo. But they can’t sit still because there is a pack of newer engines right behind.