Gigablast down?

[takagi]

For almost a month or so, the counter of indexed pages was frozen at 273,661,136 pages on the homepage of Gigablast [gigablast.com]. Well for a day or so it was 273,661,152 pages, but then it returned to 273,661,136 pages. That would be nothing special for Google or AlltheWeb, but Gigablast updates that number every second or so.

Now I cannot even contact Gigablast's site anymore. This doesn't bode well. Anybody an idea what's going on there? Matt Wells?

[jmccormac]

Down from here (Ireland). Getting a 'connection refused' error.

Regards...jmcc

[sem4u]

It's working fine for me in the UK.

[Pikin_It_Up]

page cannot be displayed

[engine]

It's working fine for me at the moment.
Perhaps there is a router failure between you and GB?

Try using a proxy to see if you've still got the same problem.

[steve40]

Down from midwest USA
all other sites accessable
steve

[takagi]

It is now working for me here in Japan. When I first had the problems, also WebmasterWorld's Server Header Check [webmasterworld.com] gave an error. That one is now still reporting a 'Connection refused' error. Maybe some DNS problem?

[mathguy]

Works for me right now in Southern California. It is a little interesting thought that the number of pages listed on the homepage seems to be static lately. Hopefully this isn't permanent. The ability to get your page indexed quickly and have the numbers update quickly seems to be unusual amongst search engines these days.

[jmccormac]

Visible here in Ireland now.

Regards...jmcc

[takagi]

It is a little interesting thought that the number of pages listed on the homepage seems to be static lately. Hopefully this isn't permanent.

Today I saw the counter was going up and down again for the first time in several weeks. Later it stopped, but even when the counter was moving you could still read at the 'add URL' page the message "Sorry, this feature is temporarily disabled. Please try again later."

BTW, Matt Wells gave an interview [acmqueue.com] to ACMqueue. Few quotes:

• Search is a fiercely competitive arena, even though there are really only five Web search companies today: Google, Yahoo (Altavista/AlltheWeb/Inktomi), Looksmart (Wisenut), AskJeeves (Teoma), and Gigablast.
  
• I'm hoping to build Gigablast up to 5 billion pages this year. My income level should allow me to do that if I invest everything in hardware and bandwidth.
  
• [Gigablast] runs on eight desktop machines, each with four 160-GB IDE hard drives, two gigs of RAM, and one 2.6-GHz Intel processor. It can hold up to 320 million Web pages (on 5 TB), handle about 40 queries per second and spider about eight million pages per day.

A nice read for everyone interested in Search Engines.

---

Added: Just found there was already a thread about this article: Matt Wells interview - Gigablast search engine [webmasterworld.com]

[takagi]

It seems Gigablast had a roll-back to the index last updated in early March. Pages added a few days ago are now gone, and the counter is back to the '273,661,136 pages' which was the value for the end of March and most of April.

[b0rdslide]

I'm seeing 274,417,760 pages indexed which keeps going up and down and the Add URL option is open again.

Kev

[takagi]

Hi b0rdslide, Welcome to Webmasterworld.

Gigablast is now indexing again, and it seems the rollback I mentioned in my previous post was undone since pages indexed a week ago now have 'Apr 20 2004' or 'Apr 21 2004' next to the URL. Sometimes I've got the feeling there are 2 different 'data centers' (to speak in Google terminology) at Gigablast. Yesterday when I did a search with the Standard Search with 10 pages per result I saw a slightly different order in the SERPs and sometimes different indexed dates, than when I did an Advanced Search with more than 10 results per page. And those differences were not caused by the cached results.