Founded in 2000, Gigablast was created to index up to 200 Billion pages with the least amount of hardware possible. Gigablast provides large-scale, high-performance, real-time information retrieval technology for partner sites. The company offers a variety of features including topic generation and the ability to index multiple document formats. In addition, the Gigablast website provides unique “Gigabits” of information, enabling visitors to easily refine their search based upon related topics from search results.

Matt, where does the name Gigablast come from?

Matt Wells: “Gigablast came from me taking powerful prefix and suffix snippets at random and gluing them together. Some of the other snippets I tried: giga mega tera peta uber tech accu blast data web slurp. Almost every word I formed was already owned, but I noticed that gigablast was about to expire, so I jumped on it.”

GigaBlast is an environmentally friendly search engine!

Just to recap: on Monday we challenged you to hold off on using any of the five major search engines all day Tuesday, and instead, try one of the many alternative search engines out there. So Tuesday was dubbed the “Day without Google.” (Editor’s note: In this context ‘Google’ refers to all five of the major search engines; Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Ask, and AOL).

Yesterday, Wednesday , we asked everyone to post a comment sharing their experiences from Tuesday. So today is The Day after Tomorrow, where I’d like to summarize your comments to see what we learned from our little experiment. It went like this:

Group #1

Group #1 is easy to describe – they refused to participate! I call this the “I’d rather fight than switch” group. (Who is old enough to remember those ads?)

David Berkowitz made this pithy remark, “I might as well take it as a vacation day. The top 5 are the top 5 for a reason.” Sal writes, “One of the other search engines will have to offer me something I can’t get with Google. I’m an experienced user, I find what I’m looking for. I’m familiar with the interface. Why would I change? If one of the other search engines are good, I’ll hear about it from someone.”

These are the hard-core Googlers, and there are millions of them! The Alts certainly have their work cut out for them as they try to lure this group away from Google!

Let’s contrast that group with Group #2.

Matthew said, “I’m gonna try this…I hope I survive!”

Ramenos writes, “OK, I will try.”

Chee; “This sounds like something interesting. I’m gonna try this.”

Alan said, “Hi, Why not?”

Nick; “Great idea, by the way! Planning on doing it and talking to the other ‘tech’ people I know to do it too!”

I think if I was at an ASE party, these folks would be the ones having the most fun!

Group #3 can be summed up in one word:

Honesty. You just have to admire the candor of these folks.

Michael writes at 9:53 am, “Bah, I blew it.”

The Muso admits that, “yeah, I lasted about two hours…unfortunately the subconscious got me too. I didn’t even realise what I was doing until it was too late.”

Steve had a similar experience, “(I) find (that I) just hit the search without even really thinking about it.”

Richard MacManus, my role model and mentor, also succumbed to the Siren’s Song.

I think all of us can sympathize with someone reaching for that well-worn “G” key without even thinking about it. Google hasn’t just become a verb, it’s become a synapse! For these poor souls, Google is not just ‘the environment,’ it’s an addiction, a habit so ingrained that they could form the Googlers Anonymous Group (GAG).

Step One “We admitted we were powerless over Google–that our lives had become unmanageable.”

Group #4 moved right along:

Catherine reports, “I tried out Quintura , and really liked it.”

Nick says, “I used Clusty for my day. Very impressed.” (Sal, did you catch that?)

Outer writes, “Perfect, I did it..I used the Quintura extension for Firefox…”

Alan tried KartOO , josebrwn tried Zuula and Quintura and WiseNut .

On Read/WriteWeb. Josh tried Lexxe , and you can read about his experience here .

Clearly Quintura was the most popular, probably because Quintura and KartOO just tied for Search Engine(s) of the Month. But just to be safe, Quintura CEO Yakov Sadchikov posted his own comment!

Finally, there is Group #5 - the wise (guys).

Mickey laments, “But what will happen with my AdSense ads? I will not get a dime this day!”

Chris chimes in, “I also find it funny that…you are using a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to maintain the data.”

For the record, Chris, I sent that data to Richard from my Google Docs account – so there!

Seriously, if MSN and Google announced tomorrow that they were going to offer everything but search, I’d be fine with that.

In conclusion, I think that AltSearchEngine readers, by and large, were willing to accept the challenge and try an alternative search engine for one day. I’m certain that the alts that they chose are grateful for the chance to show off their wares, and that’s what this blog is all about. And for everyone who did not get a chance to participate, here’s a list of 100 to get you started!

Yesterday was the Day Without Google, a one-day blog event organized by AltSearchEngines. A lot of people tried to last a day without using Google’s ubiquitous search engine, and in this post we take a look at the results. TheRegister has already covered the event, in an article provocatively entitled Blog calls for Google boycott. WebProNews also had a good report. Note that our intent wasn’t to “boycott” Google – Google is number 1 for a reason, which is that it’s the best search engine around. The reason behind the ‘Day Without Google’ was purely to encourage people to experiment with and test out some of the hundreds of Google competitors; maybe even catch a glimpse of the future dominant search engine. Anyway TheRegister article included this great quote from AltSearchEngines editor Charles Knight:

“Yesterday, Michael VandeMar tried to go eighteen hours without visiting the big five search engines. Taking up a challenge from search engine guru Charles Knight, he’d resolved to avoid Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Ask.com, and AOL from 6am to midnight. By 9:53, he’d given up. “Bah!” he wrote to Knight’s Alt Search Engines blog. “I blew it.”

“I immediately thought of the Seinfeld master-of-your-domain thing,” Knight told The Register.”

I have a confession to make. I too blew it. I used Hakia for the beginning of the day, but then sometime before lunch I subconsciously used Google again. I think I was so focused on getting my work done, that out of habit I typed something into the Google toolbar and pressed enter. Quick as a flash, the Google results page came up. I felt soooo guilty! It goes to show just how difficult it is to change ingrained habits on the Web.

Read/WriteWeb author Josh Catone got the job done though. He used Lexxe, Hakia and other ‘natural language processing’ search engines throughout the day. He reported mixed results, concluding that “my day without Google demonstrated to me just how far alternative search engines (at least those of the natural language set — which is one of the most hyped variety as potential “Google-killers”) have to go to catch up with Google and the other big 5 search engines.”.

Other Read/WriteWeb and AltSearchEngines readers reported their findings via comments. Michael Clarke admitted “I lasted about ten minutes” (I can take some comfort in lasting longer than that!). Dan Grossman wasn’t game enough to “switch to alternative search engines I’ve never heard of.” He did however use Ask.com and was generally satisfied. Catherine lasted the whole day using Quintura, reporting that it “gave me useful results up front”. Over on AltSearchEngines, Nick T used Clusty and said: “Very impressed. It came up with good results right off and the cluster controls were just what I need to be able to tweak the results to get where I ultimately wanted (as well as explore “nearby” results).”

So, were you a “master of your domain”? Tell us your results in the comments…

This is an exciting post.  I’ve wanted to tell you about the List Masters since we launched AltSearchEngines.  Please check out this article that a List Master just posted.

Most people are familiar with the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines list that I publish here monthly.  But not everybody knows that the Top 100 alts are culled from the Master List of the Top 1,000 (one thousand) alternative search engines!

And very few people know that the Master List is scrupulously maintained by five volunteer List Masters.  I am one, Laura is one, and there are three others who can introduce themselves in the comments to this post – if they want to.

The list is maintained, as Laura notes, on a CentralDesktop spreadsheet in cyberspace.  Each List Master has a password authorizing him or her to add a new alt, edit a URL or category, or delete a defunct one.  The list stays at 1,000 because the goal is not to have every alt search engine in the universe, but to have a database of the 1,000 best from which we write all of our posts, etc.

So when you see the Top 100 list, now you know about the 900 you don’t see.  Every alt has a 1 in 10 chance of making the Top 100 – a very dynamic and competitive process, especially since every day we find new ones and delete old ones!

If you have a question for the List Masters, please ask it here.  I’ll email them now and ask them to check in.  Meanwhile, please thank them for making this whole blog possible!

Continuing our tour of Congoo’s corporate headquarters, here’s a personal message directly from Congoo’s co-founder Rafael Cosentino:

What’s great about Congoo? Congoo is the only technology that allows users to get access to subscription content without a subscription. Congoo’s patented Netpass code runs in the content management systems of subscription partner websites like eContent, Zacks, the Wall Street Journal, Morningstar, Harvard Health and many others. Because other search engines cannot provide access to these subscription links, they don’t display them in search results or news channels…can you believe hat? So there are literally thousands of sources of the highest quality content that go unnoticed at the point users search or browse news channels.

How to access Premium Content?

Publishers are faced with a daunting question in a hot ad market too. “How can I let non-subscribers into my content so that I make more ad revenue without cannibalizing existing subscription revenue?” By limiting the amount of free articles that we allow users to access, Congoo creates a solution for publishers and users. The vast majority of users don’t want unlimited access to subscription content; they only want to read occasional personally relevant articles so the solution works well for everyone. Best of all the process is patented so you won’t find other portals providing that service. Congoo’s search strategy is to provide the same information you would find on a typical search result and then to add a layer of premium content plus the free access piece. Congoo is capitalizing on the fact that search results are a commodity and that no other portal can duplicate the unique access component.

CONGOO’S News Channel is also very unique.

Dare I say “Congoo is the most comprehensive source for news on the Web”- and its not just because we provide headlines from more sources than any other provider. Let’s address the current problem with consuming news first. Lots of people think RSS is great but actually it’s not so great for a few reasons when you think about it. The first is that less than 5% of Web users utilize RSS so its not mainstream at all. The second reason is that if I know what to do with RSS, it’s a one dimensional solution that does not suit my multi-dimensional news needs. If I am a person interested in news about newspaper publishing then why would I subscribe to a RSS feed from Editor & Publisher when that feed only contains Editor and Publisher’s news? Subscribing to anything less then every single RSS feed available on the Web means that you want to limit the news that you are exposed to. Lots of other sources write news about newspaper publishing. OK, once you realise that I want to see all stories related to a subject, and not just from a few niche sources you get past the RSS thing real fast. So let’s talk about keyword news searchers and their ineffectiveness. If you work in the agriculture industry, you will want to view news stories that directly affect the agricultural industry. Performing a keyword search for the word “agriculture” however is basically useless because many of the most important stories that impact agriculture don’t contain the keyword “agriculture.” Conversely, many articles that have little to do with agriculture do contain the keyword. So again, staying current in an industry is nearly impossible using single sources like RSS or subject focused keyword searches. This is precisely why we designed Congoo’s new platform the way we did.

How Congoo works

Everyday Congoo indexes around 200,000 news articles from over 25,000 news sources. We do not limit the sources that we pull from. Congoo then clusters all of those articles by subject into nearly 500 subject focused channels like agriculture, robotics, nanotechnology and genetics. Once the articles are tagged for subjects, Congoo’s technology clusters articles into stories. Today (when Rafael wrote this) you’ll see that there are 34 articles about the White House calling former president Jimmy Carter irrelevant. Even though there are 34 articles, they are all the same story, so Congoo clusters them together.

The Last Word

We believe the nuances are what make commodity services extraordinary. We are working hard on launching a new feature very shortly which will again prove to be a step above what the others are doing by providing technology that simplifies and provides access.

Thanks!

Rafael Cosentino
Co-founder Congoo & VP of Business Development