Over the last decade, private search engines have become popular and we have experienced a widespread adoption.  Years ago, it was unthinkable that established search engines like Google and Bing would experience serious competition based on the continuous improvements they deployed.

However, as the user needs to keep changing, it’s now a matter of reality that Google is facing serious competition from these alternatives. Despite the improvements that we’ve seen major search engines introducing, we continue to see users adopting the private search engines.

Why do private search engines matter to today’s web users?

Historically, Google did not do the amount of user activity tracking as they do today. It’s clear that these leading search engines link user searches and other web behavior. These search engines use targeted advertising as a source of income.

To increase their earnings, they use features like Cookies to track users and use the data to advertise to the users. Aware of this behavior, users resulted in using private search engines that do not track their activity.

Some of the benefits of using private search engines include:

  • No targeted advertising
  • Expiring of browser history
  • SSL encryption
  • Private design
  • Transparency

A good example is Gigablast. Let’s take a closer look at this private search engine.

What is Gigablast?

Gigablast is an open-source private search engine that was founded in the year 2000, in Mexico. The private search engine is designed to offer the users a large-scale and high-performance information search and retrieval. It supports topic generation and it comes with the ability to index different document formats.

Gigablast can index PDF, Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, as well as the postscript documents. The search engine also supports user-definable filters. It’s made with the super recall capability returning extra results with some of the query terms used while searching the web.

Moreover, the search engine features maximum scalability while maintaining a low cost. The search engine has gained popularity worldwide and some of the users include NASDAQ 100 listed companies including the boutique companies.

Gigablast maintains its own searchable index of over a billion pages.

Gigablast features

Since the launch of Gigablast 17 years ago, the search engine has seen a number of improvements.

Consequently, the search engine has seen growth in its user base gaining popularity in different parts of the globe. Statistics show that India is where the search engine gets more traffic compared to other countries. The search engine supports different specialized searches and Boolean operators in its search.

Here are some of the features of the Gigablast search engine.

  • Supports boolean searching: the Gigablast search engine features the full Boolean and the implied Boolean searching. This means that you can use the minus sign placing it directly in front of search terms so that the term is excluded from the search results.
  • Proximity searching: this is phrase searching that is available with a “double quotes” used around the phrase or when entering the terms into the search engine box.
  • Search results are sorted by relevance score: the search engine search results are sorted in order of relevance score. Therefore, this eliminates the ranking factor on search results.
  • Feature the Giga-Bits: this refers to the related concepts listings, the reference pages, as well as the related pages. This appears in the shaded areas that precede the search results. Through the Giga-Bits, the search engine offers you search suggestions that are based on the search term that has been used. This is a highly relevant feature helping the user to think of additional search concepts narrowing down the search.
  • Gigablast reference pages: some search result pages have reference pages and are sets of the expert websites containing the list of links that are relevant to the search term.
  • Links to other search engines: the Gigablast search engine offers links to the other search engines like Google, Yahoo, ask as well as the MSN search engine.
  • Maintains the stop word list: Gigablast will not search for the stop words unless the user typed them as part of the search phrase and without quotation marks.

How does Gigablast work?

Searching the web with Gigablast is a breeze. To get started, just enter the query term or phrase and click the “Go” icon. Your search will retrieve plenty of results relevant to the search term used.

In addition, Gigablast gives you spelling suggestions gigabits, which are related topics, the reference pages as well as the related pages.

Gigablast also allows the users advanced search feature that comes with word inclusion, phrase searching and restricts certain URLs. In addition, the web browser comes with site clustering that can be turned on and off while it also features the results per page feature.

Is Gigablast safe?

Gigablast is a safe search engine. However, being an open-source web crawler, there have been concerns over the level of security. According to the owners of the search engine, this doesn’t have to cause any alarm since they believe they have provides the safest search engine.

Gigablast vs Google

A report published on Searchenginejournal.com indicates that 55% of study participants believe the Gigablast search results are as good as or better than the Google results.

Ease of use

The Gigablast user interface is easy to use. This also compares to the Google user interface that is simple and direct to use as well. As a result, there are not so many fancy features and the design focuses on a straightforward and simple search.

Security and privacy

Gigablast outdoes Google when it comes to user details privacy. As you already know, Google uses user details for advertising.

However, Gigablast is a private search engine and does not share user details. Therefore, Gigablast is a safer environment

Quality of search results

Gigablast has more advanced functionalities that allow the platform to return better results compared to Google. Consider that the platform doesn’t rank for promotional purposes as Google does. The search engine also features Gigabits search suggestions or search concepts superior to what Google offers.

Gigablast vs Google

Owning companyGigablast, Inc.Alphabet, Inc.
Launch date20021998
Number of pages indexedOne billionHundreds of billions
(over 100,000,000 GB)
Number of daily queriesunknown3.5 billion
Security featuresHTTPS, cookie-free, guaranteed privacyRoutinely associates each search with cookies and tracks user IP addresses, building profiles for marketing purposes.