About Gigablast

Gigablast was founded in 2000 by Matt Wells, a former employee of Infoseek, with the goal of creating a scalable, open-source search engine. Gigablast stood out as one of the few indie search engines and was designed to handle billions of web pages. Its search technology was released as open-source software under the Apache License, enabling developers and smaller companies to use its capabilities for custom search solutions.

Gigablast developed its own web crawler and indexing technology, indexing over 12 billion pages during its operational history. It offered an API stack that allowed other search engines, such as Zuula, Clusty, and Ixquick, to scale. As an open-source search engine, Gigablast provided its code for anyone to use, allowing customization for specific search needs, while its real-time crawling kept search results up-to-date.

As of 2024, Gigablast remains operational with a niche following. Though it never reached the scale of larger competitors, it is still used by developers and researchers who require open-source search technology. Matt Wells, the sole developer for nearly 23 years, continues to maintain the engine, making Gigablast one of the longest-running indie search engines in the world.

Gigablast Timeline

• 2000: Gigablast was founded by Matt Wells, a former Infoseek engineer. It aimed to be a highly scalable search engine, capable of indexing billions of web pages while maintaining fast query responses. Gigablast stood out because it was developed almost entirely by a single person, making it a unique competitor in the search market.
• 2002: Gigablast launched its public search engine, focusing on providing users with up-to-date results and an index that included billions of web pages. It quickly became known for its speed and the technical prowess behind its custom-built search technology.
• 2003-2005: As Google grew rapidly in the search market, Gigablast sought to differentiate itself by offering an API that allowed developers to integrate Gigablast’s search capabilities into their own applications. This helped it attract a niche audience of developers and webmasters who appreciated its openness and customization options.
• 2009: Gigablast made a significant shift by releasing its source code as open-source software. This move allowed developers around the world to use and modify Gigablast’s search engine software, making it one of the few search engines of its time to embrace open-source principles.
• 2010s: Despite its open-source approach, Gigablast struggled to attract mainstream users. It continued to operate its public search engine, but most of its usage came from academic circles, niche tech communities, and those who valued alternative search engines for specific use cases.
• 2015: Gigablast introduced decentralized search technology, exploring ways to build a search engine that could distribute indexing and querying across multiple servers. This concept aimed to challenge the centralized approach of companies like Google, but it never gained widespread traction.
• 2020s: Gigablast maintained its presence as an open-source search engine, but its user base remained small and focused primarily on technical enthusiasts and researchers. It continued to offer a public search interface, as well as the ability for users to run their own instances using its open-source software.
• Legacy: Gigablast is remembered for its DIY approach to search engine development and its commitment to open-source principles. It never achieved the commercial success of its larger competitors, but it became a symbol of independent innovation in the search engine space, proving that alternatives to Big Tech could exist—even if only in niche corners of the web.

Expand your horizons—here’s another search engine history to explore. Google: The Search Engine That Redefined the Internet.